Applications of utility concept and desirability function for materials selection

To satisfy the requirements of the manufacturing industries, material selection is considered as an important task. Wrongly chosen material may unnecessarily increase the product cost and lead to early failure of the product. While developing a product, the most suitable material is to be selected based on the requirements of the product and the available material properties. These material properties must match with the product requirements. To aid this material selection decision-making process, several mathematical tools and techniques have already been developed by the past researchers. Some of those techniques are computationally complex and their solution accuracy is often affected by the introduction of additional mathematical parameters. In this paper, two conceptually simple but strong mathematical techniques, i.e. utility concept and desirability function approaches are proposed to solve four material selection problems. These two methods are based on the quality characteristic values of the considered material alternatives for arriving at the satisfactory results. Almost a close match between the rankings of the alternatives obtained by these two methods and those derived by the past researchers confirms the suitability of both these approaches for solving material selection problems. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.