Development of an ITARA-based hybrid multi-criteria decision-making model for material selection

The optimum selection of material in manufacturing environment should be investigated using a strategic perspective because of its complex nature. The ideal alternative cannot be found easily due to the different criteria, so the decision maker has to consider several factors for selecting the appropriate material. As a result, the decision maker should design a proper form of decision support system to solve the given problem. From decision-maker perspective, it is not easy to determine criteria weights of materials selection problem. Especially, several criteria cause inadequate subjective evaluation. In order to prevent this, different novel hybrid models were developed by using indifference threshold-based attribute ratio analysis (ITARA), VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) and multi-objective optimization on the basis of ratio (MOORA) methods. Two case studies (material selection of flywheel and cryogenic storage tank) were taken from the literature to test these models. ITARA is used to calculate the criteria weights in the problems, and the final rankings are obtained by using VIKOR, TOPSIS and MOORA. The results indicate that the proposed methods produced successful results in terms of material selection perspective.