Developing a decision support system software for cotton fibre grading and selection

This paper reports the study on the development of a 'decision support system (DSS)' software for cotton fibre grading and selection, and-its applications in the textile spinning industry. Two multi-criteria decision making approaches, namely 'analytic hierarchy process (AHP)' and 'technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solutions (TOPSIS)', have been amalgamated in the developed DSS software. AHP has been used to elicit the relative importance or weights of cotton fibre properties and TOPSIS to calculate the final quality value (closeness index) of cotton fibres with respect to yarn qualities. The developed software has been validated using the published cotton fibre and yarn data. The quality value of cotton fibres given by the DSS software shows good correlation with the yarn uneveness.