Handling equipment Selection in open pit mines by using an integrated model based on group decision making

Article history: Received 25 January 2012 Received in revised form April, 5, 2012 Accepted April 8 2012 Available online 11 April 2012 Process of handling equipment selection is one of the most important and basic parts in the project planning, particularly mining projects due to holding a high charge of the total project's cost. Different criteria impact on the handling equipment selection, while these criteria often are in conflicting with each other. Therefore, the process of handling equipment selection is a complex and multi criteria decision making problem. There are a variety of methods for selecting the most appropriate equipment among a set of alternatives. Likewise, according to the sophisticated structure of the problem, imprecise data, less of information, and inherent uncertainty, the usage of the fuzzy sets can be useful. In this study a new integrated model based on fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (FTOPSIS) is proposed, which uses group decision making to reduce individual errors. In order to calculate the weights of the evaluation criteria, FAHP is utilized in the process of handling equipment selection, and then these weights are inserted to the FTOPSIS computations to select the most appropriate handling system among a pool of alternatives. The results of this study demonstrate the potential application and effectiveness of the proposed model, which can be applied to different types of sophisticated problems in real problems. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved