Online consumer reviews have become a substantial part of consumers’ decision-making process as they provide consumers abundant information on products and services. Some individuals will pay attention to certain components (e.g. price), whereas some will focus on other components such as images.

Recently, the migration of refugees has been drastically increasing and became a global issue which indirectly affects the shipmasters, authorities and shipowners during rescue operations. The objective of this paper is to study the challenges or difficulties in rescuing refugees at sea from the perspectives of shipmasters, authorities and shipowners in Malaysia. In this study, the key challenges faced by these three groups of individuals are collected and classified based on the primary data reviewed. The interview sessions were conducted with selected expertise and the data collected are analyzed based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) or precisely the pair-wise comparison methods. Through the calculations, the challenges are ranked from the most important challenges to the least important challenges. Furthermore, the data is analyzed by using expert judgments focusing on the relatively most important challenges faced by the three groups of individuals. Finally, the most important challenge faced by shipmasters is the safety of ships and crews, while for authorities, the most important challenge faced is delays in the initiation of rescue operations. For ship-owners, the most important challenge faced is time sensitive cargo loss. Ultimately, two suggestions have been proposed to encounter the most important challenge faced by these groups.

This study suggests new approach to identify core technologies through patent analysis. Specially, the approach applied data mining technique and multi-criteria decision making method to the co-classification information of registered patents. First, technological interrelationship matrices of intensity, relatedness, and cross-impact perspectives are constructed with support, lift and confidence values calculated by conducting an association rule mining on the co-classification information of patent data. Second, the analytic network process is applied to the constructed technological interrelationship matrices in order to produce the importance values of technologies from each perspective. Finally, data envelopment analysis is employed to the derived importance values in order to identify priorities of technologies, putting three perspectives together. It is expected that suggested approach could help technology planners to formulate strategy and policy for technological innovation.

This paper examines the applicability of formal safety assessment to the passenger ships. This is followed by an analysis of passenger ship characteristics and a proposed formal safety assessment methodology. Five interlocking steps are described to construct a safety model including novel risk assessment, cost-benefit analysis and decision-making approaches. A case study is carried out in order to demonstrate the proposed methodology. Further development in formal safety assessment in the context of passenger ship safety is finally discussed in detail.

유역 환경에 대한 복잡성의 증가는 단일 의사결정자들이 의사결정문제의 모든 부분을 고려하는 것을 점점 더 불가능하게 만들기 때문에 불확실성은 더욱 증가하게 된다. 따라서 본 연구는 그룹의사결정기법을 사용하여 우리나라 공간적인 홍수 취약성을 정량화하는 접근법을 제시하였다. 개인의 선호도를 분석하기위해 Fuzzy TOPSIS를 사용하였고 개인 선호도의 통합을 위해 Borda count, Condorcet 그리고 Copeland 방법을 사용하였다. 마지막으로 도출된 결과를 Fuzzy TOPSIS 및 TOPSIS의 결과와 비교하였고 스피어만 순위상관계수와 켄달의 순위상관계수, Emond와 Mason이 제시한 순위상관분석을 이용하여 순위의 일치성을 검토하였다. 그 결과 일부 지역의 취약성 순위가 큰 폭으로 역전되는 현상을 보였다. 그룹의사결정 개념을 반영하여 지역별 취약성을 산정할 경우 우선순위의 변동이 클 수 있으므로 홍수 취약성 산정시 본 연구에서 제시된 모델을 고려할 필요가 있다.

최근 국내에서는 기상이변으로 인한 홍수피해가 증가하고 있으나, 환경, 경제 및 정치적 문제로 인해 댐과 같은 대규모 수공구조물의 설치가 어려우며, 이에 대안으로 천변저류지의 설치를 검토하기 시작했다. 천변저류지는 비교적 규모가 작아 대상유역에 설치가능한 후보지가 다수 존재하며, 이들 후보지를 적절히 조합할 경우 효율적인 홍수 조절효과를 기대할 수 있다. 그러나 천변저류지 후보지가 다수 존재할 경우 최대의 효과를 제공하는 조합을 결정하기는 어려우며, 특히