Fuzzy MCDM approach to R&D project evaluation in Taiwan’s public sectors

In most industrialized countries, the role of public sectors has been undergoing massive changes in the past several decades. One of the major reformations in public sectors is the pursuit of the ability to distinguish between executive performances. Thus establishing a performance-oriented evaluation in public sectors is the key to successful administrations. However, because of lacking relative comparable measuring standards, it is difficult to measure the relative performance of one unit while comparing to other units with regard to the multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) of performance evaluation. This study mainly focuses on the performance ranking of Research and Development (R&D) projects in Taiwan’s public sectors. The algorithm in this study is based on the concept of fuzzy set theory and the hierarchical structure analysis. The analyzing method adopts the methods of standard normal distribution, linear transformation and fuzzy MCDM, carrying on the analysis of multiple criteria of the performance evaluation. In order to differentiate the indistinct linguistic terms and make the performance evaluation be able to match true conditions, the characteristic of adopting fuzzy set theory in this study is to construct the membership function for those criteria of performance evaluation. In the meantime, this study constructs linguistic values to the subjective judgments and analyzes the ranking results of the performance evaluation with respect to 45 R&D projects of one of Taiwan’s electric power companies.