Fuzzy Extended Dependencies to Support Decision-Making in Project Management
Francisco Araque, Ramón Carrasco, Alberto G. Salguero, Amparo Vila and Luis Martínez
Project management is becoming an important key process in industrial engineering in order to choose suitable and profitable projects for the companies. We have focused our interest from the manager point of view that needs quality data to make decisions about which kind of projects are more suitable for the company. But nowadays the suitability of the projects don’t depend only on quantitative and monetary profits other profits are more and more relevant in the decision for choosing a project such as subjective ones (group satisfaction, cohesiveness of the group, etc.).
The managers have a database with data referred to past projects but usually this database has a huge amount of data that overload the manager in order to study and detect the information he/she needs. Therefore, in this paper we propose a Data Mining process able to deal with quantitative and qualitative features using fuzzy logic (Fuzzy SQL language) to discover the knowledge that the manager needs to make decisions about the more suitable projects for the company. The Data Mining process proposed will obtain Fuzzy Functional Dependencies and Fuzzy Gradual Dependencies by using a flexible query language as the Fuzzy SQL (FSQL), which will provide the information that will support project managers decisions about which type of projects are more suitable for the company based on the projects already done and on objective and subjective features.
Keywords: Fuzzy Functional Dependencies, Gradual Functional Dependencies, Flexible Queries, Fuzzy SQL, Data Mining, Fuzzy Databases, Project Management, Enterprise Strategy, Engineering System, Decision-making.