Comparative analysis of MCDM methods for pipe material selection in sugar industry

The material plays an important role in an engineering design process. The suitable material selection for a particular product is one of the vital tasks for the designers. In order to fulfil the product's end requirements, designers need to analyze the performance of various materials and spot suitable materials with precise functionalities. Due to the presence of large number of materials with diverse properties, the material selection process is complicated and time consuming task. There is a necessity of systematic and efficient approach towards material selection to choose best alternative material for a product. The aim of this paper is to describe the application of four Multi Criteria Decision Making methods for solving pipes material selection problem in sugar industry. FAHP-TOPSIS, FAHP-VIKOR, FAHP-ELECTRE, FAHP-PROMTHEE are the four methods used to choose the best alternative among the various materials. The ranking performance of various MCDM methods is also compared with each other and exploring the effectiveness and flexibility of VIKOR method. Five stainless steel grades such as J4, JSLAUS, J204Cu, 409 M, 304 and seven evaluation criteria such as yield strength, ultimate tensile strength, percentage of elongation, hardness, cost, corrosion rate and wear rate are focussed in this study to choose the suitable material. Crown Copyright (C) 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.