Green multiple-criteria decision-making method of selection of diamond cutting tool for promoting cleaner production in the natural stone industry

Abstract

Selection of a reasonable diamond cutting tool (DCT) is a crucial Multiple Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) problem for promoting cleaner production for a natural stone company. It has severe uncertainties in the decision information, complex interdependences among the DM criteria and needs to balance stakeholders' opinions and adopt the non-complete compensation idea in the DM process. This paper establishes a specialized index system with changing the evaluation object from ontology of DCT to the ‘stone machining system’ within the boundary demarcated by LCA. Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method is applied to analyze the interdependence relationships existing in the index system and then the indicators' weights can be obtained by Analytic Network Process (ANP) method. In order to avoid complete compensation among indicators, Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluations II (PROMETHEE II) method is used to prioritize the alternatives and identify the most reasonable DCT. The new developed MCDM algorithm is expressed based on interval-valued fuzzy set (IVFS) theory to handle the uncertain information in DM process. Integration of IVFS theory with MCDM method allows the decision-maker to use linguistic variables which correspond to interval-valued fuzzy numbers to describe their judgments and ensures all the stakeholders' preferences can be trade-off in the DM process. In the case application, the proposed method has been applied to select a suitable DCT to cut the Lotus red granite (G3768) for a stone processing company in China. As a result, the iron-based DCT (TJ-15) obtained the highest priority net flow (0.373) among five DCT alternatives and it was identified as the most reasonable DCT for the case company. The application study demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of the developed method and indicates that pursuit of matching DCT with the characteristics of natural stone is more rational than blindly adopting more advanced and expensive DCT.