A fuzzy collaborative forecasting approach for forecasting the productivity of a factory

Abstract

Productivity is always considered as one of the most basic and important factors to the competitiveness of a factory. For this reason, all factories have sought to enhance productivity. To achieve this goal, we first need to estimate the productivity. However, there is considerable degree of uncertainty in productivity. For this reason, a fuzzy collaborative forecasting approach is proposed in this study to forecast the productivity of a factory. First, a learning model is established to estimate the future productivity. Subsequently, the learning model is converted into three equivalent nonlinear programming problems to be solved from various viewpoints. The fuzzy productivity forecasts by different experts may not be equal and should therefore be aggregated. To this end, the fuzzy intersection and back propagation network approach is applied. The practical example of a dynamic random access memory (DRAM) factory is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. © 2013 Yi-Chi Wang and Toly Chen.