Chapter 6 - Future Developments

Abstract

Multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) has the potential for improving all areas of decision-making in engineering, from design to manufacture, but is especially beneficial for applications in high-technology market sectors, where product differentiation and competitive advantage are often achieved by just very small gains in material performance. The full capability of MCDM methods are realized by their ability to be able to simultaneously consider material, process, and shape for complex materials selection problems. It is essential to expand the scope of MCDM methods to a wide range of engineering applications and feedback the experience to improve materials selection. The need to handle uncertainty and make compromises are recurring practical design issues and the effective manipulation of data ranges is critical to more effective use of MCDM in materials selection. The selection of more advanced materials and materials with adapted properties, particularly composites and multifunctional materials, is a significant area that is beginning to take advantage of MCDM. With the current emphasis on materials design and modeling, it is desirable in future versions of simulation software to have multi-criteria analysis capability.