Building a fuzzy system for ranking telecommunication access network projects

The selection of projects for implementation in the competitive telecommunications market is difficult after deregulation. Most projects are governed by the complexity of a firm's policy structure and the inexactness of the database behind them. This research studies project ranking with a fuzzy expert system in order to help practising managers to prioritize projects for deploying telecommunication nodes to target buildings in an efficient and effective manner. A criterion function is constructed by which the relative merits of the projects in achieving a set of objectives are evaluated for assessment. Fuzzy theory with linguistic characterization of the projects' entries and a compositional interference set are employed for the assessment of the value, cost and risk associated with project compatibility. The problem domain is confined to access-network project ranking issues of the competitive fixed telecommunication network services industry in Hong Kong, where the monopoly industry was deregulated in the second half of 1995. A prototype of a fuzzy rule-based inference system called TANPR (Telecommunication Access Network Project Ranking) is developed to evaluate the importance of a pool of compatible projects meeting the objective specifications.