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Abstract:The demands for alternative energy resources have been increasing exponentially in the 21st century due to continuous industrial development, depletion of fossil fuels and emerging environmental consciousness. Renewable energy sources, including wind energy, hydropower energy, geothermal energy, solar energy, biomass energy and ocean power, have received increasing attention as alternative means of meeting global energy demands. After Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in March 2011, more and more countries are having doubt about the safety of nuclear plants. As a result, safe and renewable energy sources are attracting even more attention these days. Wind energy production, with its relatively safer and positive environmental characteristics, has evolved in the past few decades from a marginal activity into a multi-billion dollar industry. In this research, a comprehensive evaluation model is constructed to select a suitable location for developing a wind farm. The model incorporates interpretive structural modeling (ISM), benefits, opportunities, costs and risks (BOCR) and fuzzy analytic network process (FANP). Experts in the field are invited to contribute their expertise in evaluating the importance of the factors and various aspects of the wind farm evaluation OPEN ACCESSEnergies 2011, 4 2003 problem, and the most suitable wind farm can finally be generated from the model. A case study is carried out in Taiwan in evaluating the expected performance of several potential wind farms, and a recommendation is provided for selecting the most appropriate wind farm for construction.

Scheduling problems are frequently encountered in manufacturing systems. The results of job scheduling can have a great impact on the throughputs of systems. To maintain a high level of productivity of the systems, many objectives have to be taken into account simultaneously while evaluating the results of a scheduling arrangement. Unfortunately, in the high-dimension environment of considering these objectives, the performance evaluation over the criteria of interest becomes rather vague. Thus, it is very di cult to apply the traditional numerical methods to construct the models, though the measurement of these may not be fully compatible with the criteria of the scheduling problems. In this paper, the linguistic values of fuzzy set theory are introduced to evaluate each criterion and to represent its relative weight for the schedules of a multicriteria environment. The basic operations for the triangular fuzzy numbers and the calculations for obtaining the ranking of each aggregated linguistic evaluation for the quality of the schedule are explained clearly. According to the complex property of scheduling problems, a heuristic approach of tabu search is applied to solve the problems. The basic mechanism and spirits of the tabu search are also interpreted here. The overall procedure of the proposed approach is addressed by a numerical example. The aim is to propose an approach that can more easily apply the multicriteria technique.

This paper considers the control wafers downgrading problem (CWDP) in the wafer fabrication photolithography area. The objective of the research is to minimize the total cost of control wafers, while maintaining the same level of production throughput. For the problem under a pulling control production environment, a linear programming model is presented to set the supply rate of new control wafers and the recycle and downgrading rates so as to minimize the total cost of control wafers. A numerical example is given to illustrate the practicality of the model. The sensitivity of the linear programming model solution to changes in the underlying parameter values is also investigated. The results demonstrate that the proposed model is an effective tool for determining the control wafers downgrading policy.This paper presents a linear programming model that considers the cost of new control wafers, recycle and downgrading control wafers in wafer fabrication. The proposed model improved the performance of control wafers management, and served as the basis for setting the usage rates of control wafers.

Fossil fuels, including coal, petroleum, natural gas, and nuclear energy, are the primary electricity sources currently. However, with depletion of fossil fuels, global warming, nuclear crisis, and increasing environmental consciousness, the demand for renewable energy resources has skyrocketed. Solar energy is one of the most popular renewable energy resources for meeting global energy demands. Even though there are abundant studies on various solar technology developments, there is a lack of studies on solar technology evaluation and selection. Therefore, this research develops a model using interpretive structural modeling (ISM), benefits, opportunities, costs, and risks concept (BOCR), and fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) to aggregate experts' opinions in evaluating current available solar cell technology. A case study in a photovoltaics (PV) firm is used to examine the practicality of the proposed model in selecting the most suitable technology for the firm in manufacturing new products.