ABSTRACT
As a subject of engineering economics, investment analysis plays an important role and use analysis techniques in the solution process. Present worth analysis, return of investment, and cost/benefit analysis are the most popular investment analysis techniques in engineering economics. However, since some investment values are determined by humans/experts and these values are based on human thoughts, it is very difficult to specify exact values. In this way, fuzzy logic can be a better alternative for calculating vagueness in engineering economics' applications. Thus, uncertain cash flows, indefinite life, and indefinite time value of money require to use fuzzy present worth analysis. As a new extension of fuzzy sets, spherical fuzzy sets have stronger capabilities to model uncertain information in investment analysis problems. In this article, spherical fuzzy present worth analysis method is presented for the first time to address the fuzzy parameters of public emergency hospital investment, which is currently a major subject in Turkey. The public emergency hospital for three locations on the European side of Istanbul is evaluated using spherical fuzzy present worth analysis method. While the best location for the emergency hospital is determined as Kemerburgaz, we also conduct a sensitivity and comparison analysis in order to show the robustness and applicability of the proposed method.
ABSTRACT
With the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, it has been seen that the importance of IT companies and digitalization investments has accelerated. Engineering economics techniques are frequently used in investments and provide use among alternatives. Although benefit/cost analysis is one of the important engineering economic techniques, it is seen that it is widely used in the literature. Engineering economics analyzes are made based on the opinions and experiences of experts. While human thoughts can contain uncertainty, these uncertainties should also be taken into account in the investment evaluation. Fuzzy sets come to the fore in the literature to eliminate the uncertainty in human opinions. Fuzzy sets represent human thoughts through membership functions. Since fuzzy sets were proposed in 1965, fuzzy sets have extended to their extensions. Some of these extensions are type 2 fuzzy sets, spherical fuzzy sets, hesitant fuzzy sets, q-rung fuzzy sets, picture fuzzy sets, Pythagorean fuzzy sets, fermatean fuzzy sets, circular intuitionistic fuzzy sets, decomposed fuzzy sets and etc. When the studies on the benefit/cost analysis method, which is one of the engineering economics approaches, are examined, it is seen that it is used with fuzzy sets and their extensions. In this study, benefit/cost analysis is extended with picture fuzzy sets, and the extended model is applied in the digital transformation investment assessment for an information technology. Future suggestions and recommendations are given in conclusion section. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.