A well-regarded as well as powerful method named the ‘analytic hierarchy process’ (AHP) uses mathematics and psychology for making and analysing complex decisions. This article aims to present a brief review of the consistency measure of the judgments in AHP. Judgments should not be random or illogical. Several researchers have developed different consistency measures to identify the rationality of judgments. This article summarises the consistency measures which have been proposed so far in the literature. Moreover, this paper describes briefly the functional relationships established in the literature among the well-known consistency indices. At last, some thoughtful research directions that can be helpful in further research to develop and improve the performance of AHP are provided as well.
The concept of the circular economy (CE) has gained importance worldwide recently since it offers a wider perspective in terms of promoting sustainable production and consumption with limited resources. However, few studies have investigated the barriers to CE in circular food supply chains. Accordingly, this paper presents a systematic literature review of 136 papers from 2010 to 2020 from WOS and Scopus databases regarding these barriers to understand CE implementation in food supply chains. The barriers are classified under seven categories: “cultural”, “business and business finance”, “regulatory and governmental”, “technological”, “managerial”, “supply-chain management”, “knowledge and skills”. The findings show the need to identify barriers preventing the transition to CE. The findings also indicate that these challenges to CE can be overcome through Industry 4.0, which includes a variety of technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud technologies, machine learning, and blockchain. Specifically, machine learning can offer support by making workflows more efficient through the forecasting and analytical capabilities of food supply chains. Blockchain and big data analytics can provide the necessary support to establish legal systems and improve environmental regulations since transparency is a crucial issue for taxation and incentives systems. Thus, CE can be promoted via adequate laws, policies, and innovative technologies.
This paper investigates the reliability of a standby system incorporating waiting time to repair. The considered system consists of two units, namely, the main unit and the standby unit. Whenever the main unit fails, the whole load is transferred to the standby unit instantaneously by a switching-over device. As regards to the repairing of the main unit, it has to wait for repair whenever it fails due to unavailability of repair facility. When both the main and standby units fail, then the system goes to the complete failure mode. The system may also fail due to incorrect start of the system, which can occur due to an untrained and inexperience operator. The repair of the main and standby units follows general distribution, whereas repair due to human error is obtained with the help of Gumbel-Hougaard family copula. The system is analyzed by supplementary variable technique and Laplace transformation. Various reliability measures like availability, mean time to failure, and profit function have been evaluated for the considered system. A numerical example with a way to illustrate the utility of the model has also been presented.