Piled foundation is a method of overcoming difficulties of founding on soft soils to ensure structural safety by transferring structural load through weak soil to a stiff stratum. Due to piles importance, it is becoming necessary to avoid pile defects. These defects arouse from inadequate ground investigations, construction phases, pile loading test, and natural unforeseen geological causes. In this paper bulging is studied as a pile imperfection. The effects of bulging width, length, and shape on the pile ultimate load are investigated. Bulging may increase pile ultimate load though it is still considered as a pile defect. It was found that bulging can increase the ultimate pile load up to 200%. ª 2010 Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V.All rights reserved.

Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is based on decision model to measure alternative with shortest distance to positive ideal solution and the farthest distance from negative ideal solution. With growing complexity in decision making, vagueness and uncertainty often exist in human judgement. To manage conflicting criteria, a hierarchy structure in TOPSIS is proposed where the main criteria, sub-criteria, and alternatives are arranged in multi-level. To rate each alternatives, the weight of each criterion is evaluated using linguistic value before converted into fuzzy number as a way to measure the experts opinion. In this paper, we demonstrates our general framework for the development of hierarchal fuzzy TOPSIS. We also highlighted our initial finding on the criteria and alternatives in our case study i.e. selection of decomposition technology for food waste management. It is anticipates our work will contributes better decision making in the related area.