Abstract
Article history: Received 1 April 2011 Received in revised form May, 08, 2011 Accepted 08 May 2011 Available online 10 May 2011 Industrial robots are mainly employed to perform repetitive and hazardous production jobs, multi-shift operations etc. to reduce the delivery time, improve the work environment, lower the production cost and even increase the product range to fulfill the customers’ needs. When a choice is to be made from among several alternative robots for a given industrial application, it is necessary to compare their performance characteristics in a decisive way. As the industrial robot selection problem involves multiple conflicting criteria and a finite set of candidate alternatives, different multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods can be effectively used to solve such type of problem. In this paper, ten most popular MCDM methods are considered and their relative performance are compared with respect to the rankings of the alternative robots as engaged in some industrial pick-n-place operation. It is observed that all these methods give almost the same rankings of the alternative robots, although the performance of WPM, TOPSIS and GRA methods are slightly better than the others. It can be concluded that for a given industrial robot selection problem, more attention is to be paid on the proper selection of the relevant criteria and alternatives, not on choosing the most appropriate MCDM method to be employed. © 2011 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved
Highlights
An industrial robot is a reprogrammable multifunctional manipulator designed to move materials, parts, tools or other devices by means of variable programmed motions and to perform a variety of other tasks (Rao, 2007)
This paper mainly focuses on comparing the relative performance of ten most well-known multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods with respect to the observed rankings of the alternative robots for a given pick-n-place operation (Bhangale et al, 2004)
TOPSIS and VIKOR methods seemed to be more appropriate for solving the retrofit selection problem because they are more capable to deal with each kind of judgment criteria, having clarity of results and easiness to deal with attributes and decision options
Summary
An industrial robot is a reprogrammable multifunctional manipulator designed to move materials, parts, tools or other devices by means of variable programmed motions and to perform a variety of other tasks (Rao, 2007). The complexity of the problem can be better understood when one realizes that there are over 75 attributes that are to be considered while selecting a robot for a particular industrial application (Bhangale et al, 2004). Among these attributes, cost, load carrying capacity, velocity, weight of the robot, material of robot, drive systems, size of the robot, accuracy of the robot,. Attempts are made to find the answers of the questions, like a) Which MCDM method is more appropriate for solving the industrial robot selection problem? Attempts are made to find the answers of the questions, like a) Which MCDM method is more appropriate for solving the industrial robot selection problem? and b) Does the best robot selection decision change while using different MCDM methods?
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