Decision making for material selection using the UTA method

Abstract

The choice of materials plays an important role in the decision-making process of the manufacturing organizations. The materials affect many aspects of a product and the manufacturing process too. The improper selection of material can result in a defective final product. Thus, if satisfactory results are to be expected, immense importance must be given for proper selection of the materials. There are numerous choices and various criteria influencing the selection of material for a particular application. These criteria range from mechanical, electrical, and physical properties to corrosion resistance and economic considerations of the materials. The large number of available materials, together with the complex relationships between various selection parameters, often makes the selection process a difficult task. The problem of selecting a material for an engineering application from among two or more alternatives on the basis of several criteria can be treated as a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. This paper mainly focuses on solving two real-time material selection problems using utility additive (UTA) method, which is an almost unexplored MCDM tool to solve such type of complex decision-making problems. It is observed that the ranking performance of the UTA method is quite comparable with the other MCDM methods as adopted by the past researchers.