Multi-attribute approach for selection of polymeric materials for manufacturing gears: A case study in the automotive industry

Automotive industry is characterized by mass production, a large share in the gross national income and high employment of workers with different knowledge and skills. Improving the production process, as well as product quality, is one of the most important tasks of automotive enterprise as well as government management. This research promotes a new fuzzy hybrid model for determining the priority of polymeric materials for manufacturing gears in an exact manner, which leads to an incremental improvement in the quality of the considered product. The analysis of polymeric materials and their characteristic is based on data from the relevant literature and experiences of the best practice. The relative importance of material characteristics is stated as fuzzy group decision making problem. The weights vector is determined by using the fuzzy Analytic Hierarchical Process and fuzzy geometric mean. The rank of polymeric materials is obtained by employing the proposed Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution with triangular fuzzy numbers. The fuzzy algebra rules have been used for determining: (i) distances from Fuzzy Positive Ideal Solutions and Fuzzy Negative Ideal Solutions and (ii) closeness coefficient values. The proposed fuzzy hybrid model testing and verification are performed on real data in an automotive enterprise.