Multi-criteria decision-making approach to material selection in tribological application

摘要

This paper presents application of various multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques to material selection in tribological application. The alternative materials considered for ranking are variants of AISI 4140 which is nitrided and then coated with various low-friction surface coating materials. This study analyses and discusses the priority settings on the basis of constructed model which compares the ranking outcomes among simple additive weighting (SAW), multiplicative analytic hierarchy process (MAHP), technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), modified-TOPSIS (M-TOPSIS) and compromise ranking method (VIKOR). Attribute weights obtained by analytic hierarchy process (AHP), are used as the inputs and outputs are materials' rankings on the basis of material selection index (MSI), which help designers and engineers to reach a consensus on materials selection for a specific application. The ranks obtained by various methods are compared. Results indicate that suggested method can effectively be applied to similar problems.