An integrated hybrid multi-criteria decision making technique for material selection in the sugar industry

Abstract

Material selection is one of the most predominant activities in design process. In a successful product design, selection of material plays a vital role. As various alternatives are available, selecting the best among them which satisfies the manufacturer's requirement becomes more complex and time consuming. To choose an appropriate material with several criterion is a multi-objective task and it is a multi criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. This paper encompasses the use of preference ranking organisation method for enrichment evaluation (PROMETHEE) integrated with analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) for the successful material selection. The FAHP and AHP are used to identify the criterion weight and PROMETHEE II is employed to rank alternatives. In this work, seven attributes and five stainless steel grades are focussed for optimised selection. The obtained results are contrasted to show the effectiveness of FAHP over the traditional AHP.