Materials selection using complex proportional assessment and evaluation of mixed data methods

Material selection is a very fast growing multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem involving a large number of factors influencing the selection process. Proper choice of material is a critical issue for the success and competitiveness of the manufacturing organizations in the global market. Selection of the most appropriate material for a particular engineering application is a time consuming and expensive process where several candidate materials available in the market are taken into consideration as the tentative alternatives. Although a large number of mathematical approaches is now available to evaluate, select and rank the alternative materials for a given engineering application, this paper explores the applicability and capability of two almost new MCDM methods, i.e. complex proportional assessment (COPRAS) and evaluation of mixed data (EVAMIX) methods for materials selection. These two methods are used to rank the alternative materials, for which several requirements are considered simultaneously. Two illustrative examples are cited which prove that these two MCDM methods can be effectively applied to solve the real time material selection problems. In each example, a list of all the possible choices from the best to the worst suitable materials is obtained which almost match with the rankings as derived by the past researchers. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.