Group fuzzy AHP approach to embed relevant data on “communicating material”.

Summary The amount of data output into our environment is increasing each day, and the development of new technologies constantly redefines how we interact with information. In the context of product life cycle management, it is not uncommon to use intelligent products to ensure an information continuum throughout the product life cycle (e.g., for traceability purposes). Integrating intelligence and information into products themselves is now possible through numerous technologies (RFID, communicating materials). However, these technologies currently have low memory capacities (several kilobytes or megabytes), whereas to product databases are becoming larger and larger (several gigabytes or terabytes). As a result, a data dissemination process is required to determine the relevant information that should be stored on the product. This paper proposes a multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method based on a fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (fuzzy AHP). This method is context-aware and supports the aggregation of opinions from a group of experts. An application is proposed to embed context-sensitive information in a "communicating textile".