Virtual Booth

 Abstract

Outstanding Employee Awards play an important role in recognizing employee excellence, enhancing motivation, and promoting a high-performance organizational culture. However, the selection process in many organizations remains dependent on manual evaluation and panel judgement, making it susceptible to subjectivity, evaluator bias, inconsistent scoring, and limited transparency. These limitations may reduce confidence in the fairness and credibility of award decisions. This study aims to develop SMART-AWARD 4.0 (Smart Merit Award Ranking and Transparency System), an intelligent decision support system that provides objective, transparent, and evidence-based employee evaluation. The system integrates the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to determine criterion weights, TOPSIS to rank candidates objectively, and Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) to generate clear and interpretable explanations for every ranking decision. The key novelty of SMART-AWARD 4.0 is the introduction of the Career Achievement Index (CAI), a comprehensive metric that evaluates long-term employee excellence by combining annual performance, years of service, previous excellence awards, promotion history, professional achievements, organizational contributions, and other career-related indicators. The system further incorporates automated evidence verification, customizable evaluation weights, interactive dashboards, sensitivity analysis, bias detection, and real-time performance visualization to strengthen governance and decision accountability. SMART-AWARD 4.0 benefits society by promoting fair, transparent, and merit-based recognition practices that enhance employee trust, motivation, and organizational integrity. With its scalable and customizable architecture, the system has strong commercialization potential for universities, government agencies, healthcare institutions, statutory bodies, and private organizations seeking a reliable, explainable, and data-driven employee excellence evaluation platform.