COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF PROMETHEE AND FUZZY PROMETHEE METHODS IN EQUIPMENT SELECTION PROBLEM

Planing, managing and controling of production systems, which have varient and inconstant featured components like human, machines and materials, have got a complex and hard structure and is a process that requires taking decisions influencing by criteria more than one. Problems met this type of processes are decision problems involving numerous conflicting criteria, and in such situations employing multi criteria decision making methods providing a analytical point of view, giving mathematical and logical solutions to problems, derives great advantages in solving and subsequent stages. Equipment selection is a quite important subject for an effective production system, and is a decision making problem which is exhausting, complex, hard and generally requiring both selecting the most appropriate choice among a wide range of resembling alternatives and taking consideration of numerous criteria. In this study, the welding machine selection problem of a company is analyzed based on a multi criteria decision making problem including prioritization of the linguistically defined criteria. In our application, both partial and full ranking are determined for alternative equipments by employing crisp numbers as well as fuzzy numbers to solve the problem. Both cases are analyzed comparatively in detail with obtained results.