Fuzzy multi-attribute decision-making for evaluating manufacturing flexibility

Evaluation of manufacturing. exibility in operations management is important to determine the competitiveness of manufacturing system, and is being increasing discussed in the literature on manufacturing system. The objective of this research is to develop a multi-attribute decision-making model based on fuzzy set theory to improving the manufacturing. exibility evaluation process. Since most information available in this stage is not numerical, fuzzy linguistic assessment is used to represent the performance rating of all. exibility metrics under. exibility dimensions and importance grade of all. exibility dimensions. This paper proposes a modified LOWA operator, which uses the maximum entropy weights, and uses it to direct computation on linguistic terms. The developed model evaluates the degree of manufacturing. exibility that can assist decision-makers, when making capital investment decisions and measuring performance, in finding the need for improving manufacturing. exibility, and in determining the dimensions of. exibility as the best directions to improvement. Examples using a case study of leading Taiwan firm in the bicycle industry are used to illustrate the concept developed. In addition, sensitivity analysis can be performed to examine the solution reasonability.