A combined approach for equipment selection: F-PROMETHEE method and zero-one goal programming

With the labor and material, equipments will be used in production processes, are one of the essential components of the production systems. Equipments used in production process are an important subject, effecting the system efficiency, the labor effectiveness and the product quality, and using inappropriate equipment effects all of this issues negatively. Equipment selection is a very important point for an efficient production system and is a complex and exhaustive problem necessitating the most proper selection among the various types of equipments seeming almost identical, generally. Therefore, an equipment selection problem is a multi-criteria decision making problem entailing taking into account of several criteria and generally involving linguistic datas. In this study, a multi-criteria decision making problem compromising a ranking due to criterias expressed in a linguistic way, concerning a welding machine selection problem of a company is handled. The vagueness of the linguistic terms in the evaluation process required employment of fuzzy numbers and accordingly the fuzzy version of PROMETHEE method, which is a multi-criteria ranking technique, is applied to the selection problem. The information obtained from F-PROMETHEE results is then used as a constraint in formulating a zero one goal programming model. We demonstrated how a combined F-PROMETHEE and ZOGP model can be used for a real world application problem as an aid for equipment selection. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.