A survey of the application of fuzzy set theory in production and operations management : 1998-2009

The objectives of this research are to identify the research trends in and publication outlets for the applications of the fuzzy set theory technique in production and operations management (POM). The major findings indicate that (1) the most popular applications are capacity planning, scheduling, inventory control, and product design, (2) some application areas make more use of particular types of fuzzy techniques, (3) the percentage of applications that address semi/unstructured types of POM problems is increasing, (4) the most common technologies integrated with the fuzzy set theory technique are genetic/evolutionary algorithms and neural networks, and (5) the most popular development tool is C Language and its extension. Our survey confirms several research trends, some of which are unexpected and some of which contradict previous findings.