This paper presents a novel Multiple Criteria Decision Making methodology for assessing and prioritizing medical tourism destinations under uncertainty. A systematic evaluation and assessment approach is proposed by incorporating analytic hierarchy process and multi‐attributive border approximation area comparison methods in the rough environment. Rough number is used to aggregate individual judgements of decision makers and express their true perception to handle vagueness without any prior information. Rough analytic hierarchy process analyses the relative importance of criteria based on their preferences given by experts, whereas rough multi‐attributive border approximation area comparison evaluates the alternative sites based on the criteria weights. A case study of prioritizing different sites (cities) in India for medical tourism services is shown to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method. Among different criteria “quality of infrastructure of healthcare institutions” is observed to be the most important criteria in our analysis, followed by “supply of skilled human resources and new job creations” and “Chennai” is found to be the best medical tourism site in India. Finally, a comparative analysis and validity testing of the proposed method are elaborated, and the methodology provides a standard for select medical tourism sites on the basis of different criteria.
Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDP) serve as one of the key components in the global proteome. In contrast to the dominant class of cytosolic globular proteins, they harbor an enormous amount of physical flexibility and structural plasticity enforcing them to be retained in conformational ensembles rather than well defined stable folds. Previous studies in an aligned direction have revealed the importance of transient dynamical phenomena like that of saltbridge formation in IDPs to support their physical flexibility and have further highlighted their functional relevance. For this characteristic flexibility, IDPs remain amenable and accessible to different ordered binding partners, supporting their potential multi-functionality. The current study further addresses this complex structure-functional interplay in IDPs using phase transition dynamics to conceptualize the underlying (avalanche type) mechanism of their being distributed across and hopping around degenerate structural states (conformational ensembles). For this purpose, extensive molecular dynamics simulations have been done and the data analyzed from a statistical physics perspective. Investigation of the plausible scope 'selforganized criticality' (SOC) to fit into the complex dynamics of IDPs was found to be assertive, relating the conformational degeneracy of these proteins to their multi-functionality. In accordance with the transient nature of 'salt-bridge dynamics', the study further uses it as a probe to explain the structural basis of the proposed criticality in the conformational phase transition among self-similar groups in IDPs. The analysis reveal scale-invariant self-similar fractal geometries in structural conformations of different IDPs. Also, as discussed in the conclusion, the study has the potential to benefit structural tinkering of bio-medically relevant IDPs in the design of biotherapeutics against them.
The long-term evolution of multi agent multi criteria decision making (MCDM) and to obtain sustainable decision a novel methodology is proposed based on evolutionary game theory. In this paper multi agent MCDM is represented as an evolutionary game and the evolutionary strategies are defined as sustainable decisions. Here we consider the problem of decision making in Indian Tea Industry. The agents in this game are essentially Indian Tea Estate owner and Indian Tea board. The replicator dynamics of the evolutionary game are studied to obtain evolutionary strategies which could be defined as sustainable strategies. The multi agent MCDM in Indian Tea Industry is considered under different socio-political and Corporate Social Responsibility scenario and groups of Indian Tea Industry. Again, the impacts of imprecision and market volatility on the outcome of some strategies (decisions) are studied. In this paper the imprecision on the impact of the strategies are modelled as fuzzy numbers whereas the market volatility is taken into account as white noise. Hence the MCDM problem for Indian Tea Industry is modelled as a hybrid evolutionary game. The probabilities of strategies are obtained by solving hybrid evolutionary game and could be represented as a Dempster-Shafer belief structure. The simulation results facilitate the Decision Makers to choose the strategies (decisions) under different type of uncertainty.
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