Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is crucial for identifying risk reduction opportunities in design. This study aims to aid in the design of sophisticated medical devices by setting guidelines and addressing weaknesses in data collection and risk priority numbers (RPNs). This is achieved by developing an FMEA framework with potential efficiency and efficacy benefits for design engineers, surgeons and patients. The FMEA framework covered risk analysis and risk evaluation by integrating a cascading Delphi method to address data collection and Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) technique to address RPN calculations. This study involved the design of a flexible fetoscope for minimally invasive fetal intervention, analyzing and evaluating risks. The cascading FMEA framework had two stages for data collection, namely risk identification by individual interview and risk evaluation by individual email. The cascading Delphi FMEA framework with MCDM identified the potential risks for the mother at the tip (risk score = 0.927) and subsequent risks such as debris loss (risk score = 0.896), material degradation (risk score = 0.896), and glue dislodging (risk score = 0.896) as critical issues. By identifying failure modes early, medical device designers can better mitigate risks during the initial design stages.

Food recommender systems are pivotal in helping people make optimal dietary choices based on tremendous amounts of data. Extant studies offer different methods and techniques, but the combination of similarity search, large language models (LLMs), and multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) remains underexplored. This study proposes a new system that leverages all three. First, we utilize an LLM to suggest queries from the same domain as the dish database. Then, the queries are vectorized and used for similarity search to generate a preliminary list of suggested menu items. Next, multiple LLMs provide scores for each item, which become the MCDM inputs, where Lin’s concordance correlation coefficient (LCCC) enhances the weighted sum scalarization technique. We evaluated the prototype on three publicly available dish datasets and at classification thresholds of 0.25, 0.50, and 0.75, and the proposed domain-adaptation approach consistently outperformed the baseline query. For example, at the 0.50 threshold, precision ranged from 49.11% to 56.60%, compared with 35.40% for the baseline. Furthermore, aggregating multiple LLMs mitigates single-model bias in recommendations. To substantiate this, a bootstrap evaluation of the proposed LCCC-based consensus weighting confirms that both the estimated weights and the induced rankings are numerically stable under sampling perturbations. To further ensure the robustness and reliability of the proposed system, we validate the results against other established weighting schemes and state-of-the-art MCDM methods. Moreover, Kendall’s $\tau$-based comparisons across weighting schemes and multiple MCDM methods confirm that the proposed LCCC-based framework produces highly consistent and statistically significant rankings, demonstrating strong robustness to methodological choices. This paper contributes a system architecture and design that can be adopted for other domains of recommender systems where the capability of multiple LLMs can benefit complex and multifaceted decision-making processes.

Solving competitive facility location problems can optimize market share or operational efficiency in environments where multiple firms compete for customer attention. In such contexts, facility attractiveness is shaped not only by geographic proximity but also by customer preference characteristics. This study presents a novel heuristic framework that integrates multi-view K-means clustering with customer behavior modeling reinforced by a co-regularization mechanism to align clustering results across heterogeneous data views. By jointly exploiting spatial and behavioral information, the framework clusters customers and facilities into meaningful market segments. Within each segment, a bilevel optimization model is applied to represent the sequential decision-making of competing entities—where a leader first selects facility locations, followed by a reactive follower. An empirical evaluation on a real-world dataset from San Francisco demonstrates that the proposed approach, using optimal co-regularization parameters, achieves a total runtime of approximately 4.00 s—representing a 99.34% reduction compared to the full CFLBP-CB model (608.58 s) and a 99.32% reduction compared to a genetic algorithm (585.20 s). Concurrently, it yields an overall profit of 16,104.17, which is an approximate 0.72% increase over the Direct CFLBP-CB profit of 15,988.27 and is only 0.21% lower than the genetic algorithm’s highest profit of 16,137.75. Moreover, comparative analysis reveals that the proposed multi-view clustering with co-regularization outperforms all single-view baselines, including K-means, spectral, and hierarchical methods. This superiority is evidenced by an approximate 5.21% increase in overall profit and a simultaneous reduction in optimization time, thereby demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing complementary spatial and behavioral structures for competitive facility location. Notably, the proposed two-stage approach achieves high-quality solutions with significantly shorter computation times, making it suitable for large-scale or time-sensitive competitive facility planning tasks.

This study introduces a robust concept for considering uncertain multiobjective optimization problems, called the lightly robust max-ordering solution. This introduced solution concept offers the best option for solving issues based on the maximum cost in the worst-case scenario. Introducing a tolerable relaxation parameter can be used to increase the robustness of the solution but, at the same time, the desirable property of such a solution with respect to the nominal scenario might be decreased. Subsequently, the two measurements, which are the ‘gain in robustness’ and the ‘price to be paid for robustness’, are considered. These measurements are needed to support a decision maker to find more desirable lightly robust max-ordering solutions with a beneficial trade-off between the robustness of solutions and the quality of solutions in an undisturbed situation. Moreover, an algorithm for finding the proposed solution is presented and discussed. An instance of the benefits of the suggested solution concept is used on an example of ambulance location planning if ambulances may be unavailable.