Fuzzy ANP-based PROMETHEE II approach for evaluation of machine tool alternatives

Machine tool selection process has been a critical issue for companies for years, since improper selection of a machine tool might cause many problems, affecting negatively the productivity, precision, flexibility and company’s responsive manufacturing capabilities. On the other hand, selecting the best machine tool from its increasing number of existing alternatives in the market is a multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem in the presence of many quantitative and qualitative attributes. Therefore, most companies have utilized various methods to successfully carry out this difficult and time-consuming process. In this paper, both of the most used MCDM methods; the Analytic Network Process (ANP) and PROMETHEE II (Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enriching Evaluations) with fuzzy logic (F-ANP and F-PROMETHEE II) are integrated to present a performance analysis on machine tool selection problem. The F-ANP method is used to determine the relative weights of a set of multiple quantitative and qualitative criteria, as the F-PROMETHEE II method is utilized to rank competing alternatives in terms of a set of evaluation criteria in order to reach to the final solution. In addition, a case study is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed approach for potential practitioners and readers.