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Supplier selection has long been a strategic cornerstone for the advancement of companies from the mining sector due to its impact on many sectors as inventory management, production planning, maintenance scheduling, financial resources and environment. In this regard, expert decision-makers should deem a number of performance conflicting criteria and supplier alternatives. Moreover, choosing a suitable Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach has become a key strategic consideration for supplier selection. Hence, this paper presents a combination of powerful MCDM methods to select the most suitable supplier of forklift filters. The Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) is first used to calculate the initial weights of criteria and sub-criteria under uncertainty, followed by the implementation of Fuzzy Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (FDEMATEL) to assess the interrelations and feedback between them. The fuzzy theory is used in both AHP and DEMATEL methods to represent the human vagueness when making judgments. Then, FAHP and FDEMATEL are combined to obtain the final contributions of both criteria and sub-criteria on the basis of interrelations and uncertainty. Finally, the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is used to rank the supplier alternatives. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, a case study is presented. The results evidence that quality criterion is the most crucial aspect when selecting suppliers of forklift filters.

The objectives underlying location decisions can be various. Among them, equity objectives have received an increasing attention in recent years, especially in the applications related to the public sector, where fair distributions of accessibility to the services should be guaranteed among users. In the literature a huge number of equality measures have been proposed; then, the problem of selecting the most appropriate one to be adopted in the decision-making processes is crucial. For this reason, many authors focused on the analysis of properties that equality measures should satisfy in order to be considered suitable. Most of the proposed properties are too general and related solely to the mathematical formulation of the measure itself (i.e., simpleness, impartiality, invariance). Hence, they do not give any indications about the behaviour of such measures in the optimization contexts. In this work, we propose some new properties to be associated to equality measures in order to describe characteristics which may be useful to drive optimization procedures in the search of optimal (or near-optimal) solutions. To this aim some empirical analyses have been performed in order to understand the typical behavior of remarkable measures in presence of a uniform distribution of demand points in a regular location spaces

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