Material selection using multi-criteria decision-making methods: a comparative study

There is a vast array of materials with diverse mechanical, physical and chemical properties from which the design engineer has to choose the most suitable material satisfying different design requirements. The design engineer has to take into account also a large number of material selection criteria before arriving at the final decision, otherwise, there may be premature failure of the product during its operation. As the material selection decision for a specific product involves multiple conflicting criteria and a finite set of candidate alternatives, it is an example of multi-criteria decision-making problem. In this article, 10 most commonly used multi-criteria decision-making methods are considered and their relative performance are compared with respect to the rankings of the alternatives while selecting suitable materials for (a) a sailing boat mast, (b) a flywheel, and (c) a cryogenic storage tank. It is observed that for these three examples, all the 10 methods give almost the same rankings of the alternative materials, although VIKOR method has a relatively better performance than the others due to its computational simplicity. On the other hand, analytic hierarchy process has a comparatively poor performance which may be due to the decision maker's involvement in making the pairwise comparisons between the criteria and alternatives introducing a chance of biasness and inconsistency in the decision-making process. It can be concluded that for a given material selection problem, more attention is to be paid on the proper selection of the relevant criteria and alternatives, not on choosing the most appropriate multi-criteria decision-making method to be adopted.