Selection of Material Handling Equipment using Hybrid Entropy-VIKOR and Entropy-TOPSIS Techniques

In 21 st century, manufacturing industries has served a lot to humanity and still continuing their goals. Today, a lot of materials can be prepared within a day. In this context, importance of material handling equipments cannot be overlooked. Considering these facts, present research work is devoted to investigations in the field of material handling equipment selection. In present research work, use of multi criteria decision making techniques (MCDM) is being made for selecting appropriate material handling equipment strategy for a firm. The techniques used are entropy, VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR), and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). For this purpose the selected criteria with the help of experts’ opinion were capital cost, operation cost, distance moved, risk, availability, and safety, and alternatives were Conveyor, jib crane, fork lift, and manual delivery. Applications of different approaches yielded different rankings of the alternatives, which were made set to common ranking with the help of a statistical technique, coefficient of variance. In the last phase of research economic analysis of the research problem also validated the results.