R&D project selection by data envelopment analysis based on dematel-copras evaluation

Firms create many R&D project proposals to develop. Considering the various constraints and feasibility of the projects, only a few of these suggestions can be implemented. In this case, R&D project selection becomes a problem for companies. In this thesis, various MCDM methods in the literature were studied and analyzed. Then the appropriate methods were chosen and implemented for one of the leading bus and midibus manufacturers with 50 years of experience. In the first stage of the thesis, opinions of senior personnel with at least seven years of experience from R&D, production, marketing, and finance departments were considered together with the previous studies in the field for determining R&D project selection criteria. Four primary and 24 sub-criteria were determined with this approach, and 14 of the 24 criteria were thesis-specific criteria specified together with experts. These criteria were prioritized using the DEMATEL method in the second stage. According to DEMATEL analysis, capital investment requirement, the relative cost of the developed product, and the rate of return on investment sub-criteria of the finance main criterion prominent with their highest weight values. The defined criteria were used to evaluate alternative R&D projects in the DEMATEL-COPRAS method. The input-oriented CCR DEA model was used to assign the weight of each candidate project. As a result of the analysis, Project 4 (Axle production for domestic customer market) was selected among five projects with the highest performance value. The obtained project selection results were compatible with the experts' criteria scores. This situation reveals that the used methodology can also be applied in sectors having similar dynamics.