QFD-Based TOPSIS Methodology for Material Selection

Abstract

Material selection is one of the interdisciplinary activities involved in product design and development. It is an integral part of concept phase and configuration phase of mechanical design process. Therefore, a successful product design should take into consideration of material properties to meet the design requirements which reflect the expectations of the end users of a product. This chapter presents a user-centered material selection methodology which paves a path for reflecting user preferences into design requirements and then into material selection decision. In the proposed approach, weights of the material selection criteria are obtained through Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and then the TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) methodology is employed to achieve the optimum selection of material under a multi-attribute decision-making environment. An illustrative example is taken from the literature and presented in this chapter to demonstrate the proposed methodology.