NON-CONVENTIONAL MACHINING PROCESSES SELECTION USING MULTI-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION ON THE BASIS OF RATIO ANALYSIS METHOD

The role of non-conventional machining processes (NCMPs) in today's manufacturing environment has been well acknowledged. For effective utilization of the capabilities and advantages of different NCMPs, selection of the most appropriate NCMP for a given machining application requires consideration of different conflicting criteria. The right choice of the NCMP is critical to the success and competitiveness of the company. As the NCMP selection problem involves consideration of different conflicting criteria, of different relative importance, the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods are very useful in systematical selection of the most appropriate NCMP. This paper presents the application of a recent MCDM method, i.e., the multi-objective optimization on the basis of ratio analysis (MOORA) method to solve NCMP selection which has been defined considering different performance criteria of four most widely used NCMPs. In order to determine the relative significance of considered quality criteria a pair-wise comparison matrix of the analytic hierarchy process was used. The results obtained using the MOORA method showed perfect correlation with those obtained by the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method which proves the applicability and potentiality of this MCDM method for solving complex NCMP selection problems.