A Hybrid Fuzzy Goal Programming for Smart Phones and Rate Plan Selection

Abstract

Smartphones are essential personal belongings today. However, smartphone buyers (SBs) are often hesitant in deciding what the best smartphone and rate plan to choose offered by telecom providers. Among many new smartphones, it is often difficult for users to choose the most suitable one in consideration of reaching the salient success aspiration level (SSAL) as close as possible, e.g., large battery capacity, and avoiding falling below the survival aspiration level (SAL) as far as possible, e.g., budget limitation, simultaneously. A novel hybrid weighted SSAL-SAL fuzzy goal programming (FGP) is proposed to assist SBs in finding satisfactory smartphones of their preferences with suitable rate plans. To meet different preferences, SBs can easily set different weights for each smartphone selection goal with linguistic terms, such as high, average, and low. In addition, these linguistic terms can easily be transformed into trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. The weights are then attached to goals in the objective function in the weighted SSAL-SAL-FGP model for choosing the most suitable smartphone. Moreover, this study also allows SBs to set the goal satisfaction levels as a preemptive priority for each goal in the FGP to find the most suitable rate plan option for the selected smartphone. The proposed approach allows SBs to select the best smartphones with suitable rate plans considering their priority preferences. In addition, SBs can save costs and precious time in finding their ideal smartphones and rate plan options. Finally, various examples are used to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed weighted SSAL-SAL-FGP model, which allows SBs to set different weights for each goal with the intuitive method, such as linguistic terms or preemptive priority to select appropriate smartphones with suitable rate plans to match their habits and budgets. Besides, this study distributed an online questionnaire to investigate smartphone owners and found that female smartphone owners consider the battery capacity and the weight of the smartphone more crucial than the other criteria, while male smartphone owners prefer a smartphone with bigger screen size.