Applications of Modified Simple Additive Weighting Method in Manufacturing Environment

Abstract

Multiple criteria decisions making (MCDM) techniques are employed widely by decision-makers for ranking the potential alternatives under conflicting environments to select the best one for different industrial problems. Present work employed a modified Simple Additive Weighting (SAW) method to solve different decision-making problems in the manufacturing industry such as industrial robot selection, flexible manufacturing systems selection and, non-traditional machining processes selection respectively. The proposed methodology is simple and involves lesser mathematical complexity. The ranking obtained by the proposed modified SAW method corroborates well with other popular MCDM methods like MOORA, MABAC, TOPSIS and AHP for solving similar problems. It indicates the robustness of the proposed method. However, the proposed method is better compared to those methods through its simplicity, lesser computational complexity, and lesser computational time. Further, sensitivity analysis indicates the stability of the method. Being generic the method can be applied for solving problems related to ranking and selection in any societal segment.