Selection of industrial arc welding robot with TOPSIS and Entropy MCDM techniques

Abstract

Industrial robots have enabled manufacturing firms to produce high-quality products cost-effectively and thus are essential components of advanced manufacturing technologies. Industrial robots are designed for various applications such as welding, painting, assembly, disassembly, pick and place for printed circuit boards, packaging and labelling, palletizing, product inspection, and testing. All the features are accomplished with high endurance, speed and precision. The performance of industrial robots is determined by multiple and conflicting criteria that have to be simultaneously considered in a robust selection procedure. In this study, a simple multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methodology based on the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method is presented to choose an industrial robot for the arc welding operation. The weights of significance are attained with objective preferences using the Entropy weight method. The order of ranking obtained with the TOPSIS-Entropy technique is presented. The results showed that the MCDM approaches for robot selection are quite useful. The novelty of the study lies to prioritize industrial arc welding robots with TOPSIS-Entropy MCDM methods.