Decision-making for materials selection using fuzzy axiomatic design principles

With the advancement of manufacturing technology, varieties of materials have now become available for a particular component/product. The designer has to choose the most appropriate material so that the final requirements of the product can be optimally fulfilled. Most of the times, the material characteristics are more comfortably expressed in qualitative or linguistic terms, like poor, good, or low, medium, or acceptable, recommended, etc., rather than quantitative terms. Fuzzy set theory was developed to process such imprecise qualitative data in an efficient manner. Decision-making methods using fuzzy set theory have gained wide acceptance due to their ability to handle the impreciseness in data. Material selection problems often possess such imprecise characteristics. This paper presents a fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making method based on axiomatic design principles for material selection where both qualitative and quantitative material properties are simultaneously considered. Two problems, i.e., 1) selection of a protective coating material; 2) selection of the right type of aluminium alloy for propulsor of underwater vehicles are solved using the adopted approach. The obtained results perfectly match with those derived by past researchers.