A Fuzzy AHP Approach to Evaluate the Strategic Design Criteria of a Smart Robotic Powered Wheelchair Prototype

Abstract

In the product development process of a prototype, the most noteworthy task is to select important engineering characteristics (ECs) to avoid early stage failures such as design manufacturing, assembly, and operating errors. Hence, it is very essential to identify and reveal the conflicting design criteria with the various labels of importance associated with it. In this work, an investigation on the prototype design of a smart robotic powered wheelchair (SRPW) is proposed to select and rank the design criteria based on multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods. We have introduced two new additional design criteria, namely functional performance of wheelchair (FPW) and user immediate environment (UIE) to the existing attributes. Then, we apply analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to analyze the importance of various criteria. Furthermore, a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) is used to validate the results of AHP as the various conflicting criteria’s rating provided by expert’s acumen on the presence of these engineering characteristics could be personalized, unclear, and uncertain. In the present analysis, FPW design criteria turn out to be an important criterion for designing a SRPW, as it comes in second position in the priority level following the manufacturing cost criterion out of seven nos. of design criteria that are identified, selected, and analyzed for the proposed wheelchair. Whereas UIE placed fifth rank in this analysis and manufacturing cost as a criterion has the highest weight of 0.3657 corresponding to other ECs. It was found that both AHP and FAHP give similar result regarding the importance of calculated weights assigned to the attributes. So, this study will assist the decision maker in a better way while evaluating different factors required for the early stage design of the product as it analyzes a more number of important criterions.