Fuzzy MCDM procedure for evaluating flexible manufacturing systemalternatives

摘要

Considering the high required capital outlay and moderate risk ofa flexible manufacturing system (FMS) investment, economic justificationtechniques are insufficient by themselves since they cannot cope withthe benefits such as flexibility and enhanced quality offered byadvanced manufacturing technologies. A robust decision making procedurefor selection of flexible manufacturing systems requires theconsideration of both economic and strategic investment measures. Inthis paper, a fuzzy multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) frameworkbased on the concepts of ideal and negative-ideal solutions is presentedfor the selection of an FMS from a set of mutually exclusivealternatives. The proposed method provides the means for incorporatingthe economic figure of merit as well as the strategic performancevariables. Initially, the selection criteria and their importanceweights are determined. Linguistic variables are used to indicate theimportance weight of each criterion. Then, the decision matrixcontaining the criteria values for the FMS alternatives is normalized toobtain unit-free elements. Afterwards, the weighted normalized decisionmatrix is obtained by taking the importance weight of each criterioninto consideration. The ideal solution and the negative-ideal solutionare determined by ranking the weighted normalized values for eachcriterion. Next, the distance between each FMS alternative, and theideal and negative-ideal solutions are computed. Finally, the rankingorder of the FMS alternatives is obtained based on their relativeproximity to the ideal solution