Selecting material handling equipment with PROMETHEE

The authors present a comprehensive approach to select material handling equipment (MHE) at assembly line design stage. They defined a two-level MHE typology, namely generic types and specific equipment, to describe the numerous available systems. Based on this description, the system identifies the most suitable equipment in two stages. At the primary stage the performances of basic types are evaluated for the considered problem. Having chosen one (or more) generic equipment, specific information is used to evaluate and select the appropriate specific one. The main originality of this work is the application of a multicriteria decision-aid method, called PROMETHEE II, embedded into a decision tree. At each selection stage (node of the tree), eligible solutions are ranked according to a global evaluation of their performance for the considered parameters. The ranking is computed thanks to criteria and weights, allowing the user to accurately describe the selection process. Industrial case studies, which validate the approach, are presented.