A comparative study of preference dominance-based approaches for selection of industrial robots

In the modern era of highly mechanized technologies, manufacturing organizations are now extensively using different kinds of industrial robots for performing complicated and perilous tasks with superior levels of accuracy. The major role of robotic technology within manufacturing organizations is to amalgamate design, manufacturing and management planning activities into a flexible system for improving production lines with minimum manufacturing cost involvement. However, the pre-implementation, implementation, and post-implementation phases of robotic technologies are the foremost issues associated with the selection and rationalization of robotic investments, which is based on a thorough review and exploration of various alternative robots and their mutually conflicting performance measures. Evaluating alternative robots in the presence of multiple conflicting attributes often makes the selection task very complex. This paper focuses on the application feasibilities of two preference dominance-based multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) approaches, namely evaluation of mixed data (EVAMDC) and extended preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluation II (EXPROM2) whilst selecting the best alternative robots within given manufacturing environments. Using these two methods, a list of all the feasible alternatives from the best to the worst suitable robot is obtained by taking into account different robot selection attributes. The ranking performances of these methods are also compared with those of the past researchers, using four performance tests. (C) 2014 PEI, University of Maribor. All rights reserved.