Title: Decision-making through a fuzzy hybrid AI system for selection of a third-party operations and maintenance provider

Authors: David Bigaud; François Thibault; Laurent Gobert

Addresses: Laboratoire Angevin de Recherche en Ingénierie des Systèmes (LARIS), 62, avenue Notre-Dame-du-Lac, F-49000 Angers, France ' Laboratoire Angevin de Recherche en Ingénierie des Systèmes (LARIS), 62, avenue Notre-Dame-du-Lac, F-49000 Angers, France ' Quadrim Conseils, Le Vivaldi, 87, route de Grigny, F-91130 RisOrangis, France

Abstract: With the outsourcing and the increasing demand of facilities management services, we observe the growing of multi-technical contracts in real estate operations and maintenance (O&M). Selection of one or more contractors is actually complex and important financial and quality of service challenges depend on it. The present paper proposes a multiple-criteria decision-making tool whose objective is to predict contractors' performances and to select the one who can best respond to O&M demands. In order to build the heuristic between technical, commercial and quality criteria and the expected performances, a neuro-fuzzy system (NFS) associated with a hybrid and adaptive genetic algorithms (GA) method has been developed. Important problems are considered: data pre-processing, problem of data scarcity to provide a sufficient number of data to the NFS and optimisation of hybridisation or adaptation parameters for GA. A case study, concerning the clients' satisfaction levels for O&M contractors as a final indicator for decision-making will prove the relevance of this approach.

Keywords: outsourcing; facilities management services; multi-technical contracts; real estate O&M; operations; maintenance; O&M contractors; quality measurement; fuzzy logic; neural networks; genetic algorithms; multicriteria decision making; MCDM; contractor performance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMCDM.2016.075630

International Journal of Multicriteria Decision Making, 2016 Vol.6 No.1, pp.35 - 65

Received: 14 Jan 2015
Accepted: 18 Sep 2015
Published online: 30 Mar 2016 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article