An intelligent decision support system for industrial robot selection

Industrial robots have been used widely by many manufacturing firms worldwide. A common problem encountered by these firms is to choose the most suitable robot for a particular application, among the numerous robot models available today, with different performances and costs. The main difficulty is the lack of experience and specific knowledge of the prospective users in employing a robot, which has lead to a considerable effort focused on developing models to aid the decision makers facing a Robot Selection Problem (RSP). This paper focuses oil the development of a Decision Support System (DSS) to solve the RSP, utilizing intelligent techniques to assess the buyer's requirements and to suggest a number of alternative solutions. The use of fuzzy logic is dictated by the fact that the technical requirements and the economic preferences of the buyer may not be explicitly stated. It is, therefore, more efficient to adjust the decision model to the human reasoning approaches by employing fuzzy logic techniques. A significant number of robot models along with their characteristics (which also serve as decision criteria) have been included in a database and serve as the information platform for the DSS. The entire development is implemented in an interactive software tool, using the Visual Basic programming language. The module utilizes the MATLAB Fuzzy-Logic Toolbox, to exchange results/information with the main program. This computer-aided robot selection system call be used either by firms who deal exclusively with the distribution and instal Intent of robots or by firms who want to install robots for their own use.