A Fuzzy Multiple Attributes Decision-Making for Evaluating Flexibility in a Manufacturing System

Evaluation of the flexibility in a manufacturing system (manufacturing flexibility) is very important to determining the competitiveness of manufacturing system, and is being increasing discussed in the literature on manufacturing system. Traditional approaches have tried objectively to evaluate manufacturing flexibility, and are theoretical and involve only two or three dimensions. The importance grade of flexibility dimensions, and the subjective evaluation of manufacturing flexibility have seldom been addressed. The objective of this paper is to develop a multiple attributes decision-making model with two-stage assessment to the evaluation of the manufacturing flexibility in a manufacturing system development. The evaluation problem is solved by a fuzzy fusion method based on the maximum entropy ordered weighted averaging operators. We also provided a fuzzy fusion method of linguistic information. While evaluating the degree of manufacturing flexibility, one may find the need for improving manufacturing flexibility, and determine the dimensions of manufacturing flexibility as the best directions to improvement until she/he can accept it. An example is used to demonstrate the proposed method. Finally, we also show that the linguistic assessment of manufacturing flexibility is reasonable.