A hybrid fuzzy multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) approach to combination of materials selection

The selection of the appropriate combination of materials for a manufacturing company is one of the important points to achieving high competitiveness in the market. Besides, an appropriate choice of materials is very important as it helps to reach optimum production rate and efficiency. Today’s market offers many more choices for materials alternatives. There are also many factors one should consider as part of the appropriate combination of materials selection process, including productivity, wastage, cost, style, etc., consequently, evaluation procedures involve several objectives and it is often necessary to compromise among possibly conflicting tangible and intangible factors. For dealing with these problems, multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) has been found to be a useful approach to solve this kind of problem. Most of the MCDM models are basically mathematical and disregard qualitative and subjective considerations. The application of fuzzy set theory allows incorporating the vague and imprecise linguistic terms and qualitative information into the decision process. This paper devises a fuzzy hybrid analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) approach to the problem of thesis subject selection. Fuzzy AHP is used to formulate and calculate the weight of each criterion, and fuzzy TOPSIS is proposed to prioritize combination material alternatives from the best to the worst ones. A case study on Kaach Company was put forward to illustrate the performance of the proposed methodology.   Key words: Combination of material, material selection, fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (AHP), fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS).