Optimizing Design of Smart Workplace through Multi-Objective Programming

Abstract

Smart environments have proven very supportive to the improvement of the performance of people in different workplaces. Plenty of applications have been introduced spanning different settings including healthcare, ambient assisted living, homes, offices, and manufacturing environment, etc. However, subjectivity and ambiguity prevail in the majority of research, and still, up to date, rare approaches found quantitatively and objectively constructing or assessing the impact of smart enabling technologies on the performance of the subject environment. Further, no approaches have considered optimizing the adoption of those smart technologies with respect to objectives achievement. This article presents a novel optimization methodology for designing a smart workplace environment in conditions of ambiguity or fuzziness. The methodology begins with defining and weighing the overall goals and objectives of the workplace. The Prometthe multi-criterion decision-making technique is used to weigh the operational objectives with respect to the overall workplace goals. Next, the relation among basic building blocks of the model; namely: the operational objectives, smartness features, and smart enabling technologies are quantified, utilizing fuzzy relations. Then, the fuzzy goal programming techniques will be utilized to optimize the impact relation values while considering the budget constraint. The proposed optimization methodology is implemented on the development and optimization of the smart clinic, as a typical instance of the workplace.

Keywords

• smart environment (SE)
• smart enabling technologies (SETs)
• PROMETTHEE
• fuzzy logic (FL)
• fuzzy relations (FR)
• fuzzy goal programming (FGP)