Sustainable Welding Process Selection Based on Weight Space Partitions

摘要

Selecting a welding process for a given application is crucial with respect to the sustainability of part manufacturing. Unfortunately, since welding processes are evaluated by a number of criteria, preferences for one or the other process can be contradictory. However, the prevalent procedure of weight assignment for each criterion is subjective and does not provide information about the entire solution space. From the perspective of a decision maker it is important to be able to assess the entire set of possible weightings and answer the question which welding process is optimal for which set of weights. This issue is investigated by means of a weight space partitioning approach. Two welding processes are considered with respect to three criteria that reflect their economic and environmental performance. In order to find the most sustainable welding process the underlying weight space partition is evaluated.