Project selection for oil-fields development by using the AHP and fuzzy TOPSIS methods

The evaluation and selection of projects before investment decision is customarily done using, technical and information. In this paper, proposed a new methodology to provide a simple approach to assess alternative projects and help the decision-maker to select the best one for National Iranian Oil Company by using six criteria of comparing investment alternatives as criteria in an AHP and fuzzy TOPSIS techniques. The AHP is used to analyze the structure of the project selection problem and to determine weights of the criteria, and fuzzy TOPSIS method is used to obtain final ranking. This application is conducted to illustrate the utilization of the model for the project selection problems. Additionally, in the application, it is shown that calculation of the criteria weights is important in fuzzy TOPSIS method and they could change the ranking. The decision-maker can use these different weight combinations in the decision-making process according to priority. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.