A Hybrid Decision Support System for Holistic Evaluation of Material Alternatives
Selection of materials is pivotal for the success of engineering design applications. Their proper selection is an exhaustive task as a result of the presence of a wide range of material alternatives and performance attributes. Thus, this research proposes an integrated multi-criteria decision-making method for the sake of evaluating a set of material alternatives. The material alternatives are assessed with regards to their surface hardness, core hardness, surface fatigue limit, bending fatigue limit, ultimate tensile strength, and cost. The weights of attributes are obtained based on criteria importance through inter-criteria correlation (CRITIC) algorithm. This research then employs six types of multi-criteria decision-making algorithms to rank the material alternatives. Average ranking algorithm is then applied to generate a full consensus prioritization of material alternatives. A sensitivity analysis is also carried out to determine the most robust and sensitive multi-criteria decision-making algorithm.