Fuzzy multi-criteria evaluation of industrial robotic systems

Industrial robots have been increasingly used by many manufacturing firms in different industries. While the number of robot manufacturers is also increasing with many alternative ranges of robots, potential end-users are faced with many options in both technical and economical factors in the evaluation of the industrial robotic systems. Industrial robotic system selection is a complex problem which many qualitative attributes must be considered. These kinds of attributes make the evaluation process hard and vague. Hierarchical structure is a good approach to describe a complicated system. This paper proposes a fuzzy hierarchical TOPSIS model for the multi-criteria evaluation of the industrial robotic systems. An application is presented with some sensitivity analyses by changing the critical parameters. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.