Meta-action reliability-based mechanical product optimization design under uncertainty environment

Reliability allocation is an important procedure in the early stage of product design. However, there is not a good design scheme for the reliability allocation of mechanical products. Firstly, the reliability allocation of mechanical products is still at the system level or component level, which makes it impossible to obtain more detailed reliability input parameters. Secondly, to simplify the allocation process, the interactions among allocation objects are usually ignored, which makes the result of reliability allocation not optimistic. Thirdly, the uncertainty of reliability-based mechanical product optimization has not been dealt with effectively. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) for mechanical product optimization design based on meta-action reliability, which integrates decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), uncertain linguistic ordered weighted averaging (ULOWA) operator, and preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluations (PROMETHEE) II method. Also, the interval number is used to deal with the uncertainty flexibly in the decision-making process. Finally, the application and feasibility of the proposed method are illustrated with the automatic pallet changer (APC) of a CNC machine tool as an example. This method provides guidance for the reliability optimization design of mechanical products.