Application of the grey-based fuzzy logic approach for materials selection

Abstract

Abstract Material selection is considered an important step in the design and manufacturing of a part/product. Wrong selection of material may cause poor quality, increase in cost, early failure of the product, or any combination of them. It may also create difficulties in the manufacturing process leading to increases in manufacturing time and cost. The general rule in design is to select materials based on their properties that match with the product requirements. Hence, decision making for material selection is a crucial process, and several mathematical tools and techniques have been presented in the literature to aid this process. Those techniques have their own advantages and limitations. This paper proposes the application of the grey-based fuzzy logic approach to solve three real time material selection problems. For all the examples, the first and the last ranks of materials derived using the adopted method and those obtained by past researchers are exactly the same. This indicates that when uncertainties are involved, grey-based fuzzy logic can be employed as an efficient tool for solving complex material selection problems.