The material handling system has important impact on performance of a manufacturing or service system. The material handling equipment (MHE) selection problem generally includes evaluation of finite number of alternatives which should be ranked against different qualitative or quantitative criteria or sub-criteria. Accordingly, such a problem can be considered as a multi-criteria decision-making problem. Thus, in this article, the voting approach is first used to weight criteria and subcriteria, by introducing the assessment grades such as very low importance, low importance, moderate importance, high importance and very high importance. The synthetic value of judgements method is then adopted to convert the assessments stated as linguistics variables (by all experts) for each alternative with respect to each sub-criterion into a single fuzzy weight. Next, fuzzy weighted average is applied to aggregate the single fuzzy weights of each alternative related to subcriteria under each criterion. Finally, the fuzzy vlsekriterijumska optimizacija i kompromisno resenje approach is used to select the optimal MHE. Also, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a case study is considered and the results are compared with fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution method.
The material handling equipment (MHE) has a close connection with layout of machinery and plays the important role in productivity of servicing or manufacturing systems. Since each of MHE has distinct characteristics than the others with respect to conflicting criteria and design experts may state the different subjective judgments with respect to qualitative criteria, the material handling equipment selection problem (MHESP) can be taken into account as a group multi-criteria decisionmaking (GMCDM) problem. In this paper, a version of type-2 fuzzy sets (T2FSs), named Gaussian interval type-2 fuzzy sets (GIT2FSs), is first used as an alternative to the traditional triangular membership functions (MFs) to weight criteria and sub-criteria and also evaluate of alternatives with respect to sub-criteria. The synthetic value method of GIT2FSs is then carried out to convert the assessments stated as GIT2FSs for each alternative with respect to each sub-criterion and also weights of criteria (sub-criteria) into the single fuzzy rating and weight, respectively. Then, the fuzzy weighted average (FWA) approach is adopted to integrate the single fuzzy ratings of each alternative with respect to sub-criteria and the single fuzzy weights of sub-criteria under each criterion with the aggregated weighted ratings. In next stage, ELECTRE III (ELimination Et Choix Traduisant la Realite´-elimination and choice translation reality) is generalized with GIT2FSs to select the optimal MHE through a new ranking approach. Moreover, some arithmetic operations and properties are extended to GIT2FSs. In addition, to demonstrate its potential applications, the proposed methodology is implemented in a real case study and an illustrative example, and then, the ranking results are compared with those of the others in the literature. Finally, the sensitivity analysis is carried out to show robustness and stability of the obtained results. Keywords Material handling equipment selection problem • Gaussian interval type-2 fuzzy sets • FWA • ELECTRE III
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