Flexible manufacturing system selection using preference ranking methods : A comparative study

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) offer opportunities for the manufacturers to improve their technology, competitiveness and profitability through a highly efficient and focused approach to manufacturing effectiveness. Justification, evaluation and selection of FMSs have now been receiving significant attention in the manufacturing environment. Evaluating alternative FMSs in the presence of multiple conflicting criteria and performance measures is often a difficult task for the decision maker. Preference ranking tools are special types of multi-criteria decision-making methods in which the decision maker’s preferences on criteria are aggregated together to arrive at the final evaluation and selection of the alternatives. This paper deals with the application of six most potential preference ranking methods for selecting the best FMS for a given manufacturing organization. It is observed that although the performances of these six methods are almost similar, ORESTE (Organization, Rangement Et Synthese De Donnes Relationnelles) method slightly outperforms the others. These methods use some preference function or utility value or Besson ranking of criteria and alternatives, to indicate how much an alternative is preferred to the others. Most of these methods need quantification of criteria weights or different preference parameters, but ORESTE method, being an ordinal outranking approach, only requires ordinal data and attribute rankings according to their importance. Therefore, it is particularly applicable to those situations where the decision maker is unable to provide crisp evaluation data and attribute weights.