Comparison of Fuzzy and Multi-Criteria Decision Making Approach to Measure Manufacturing Flexibility

Manufacturing flexibility is the ability of the system to adapt to changes. Manufacturing flexibility is a difficult to quant ify concept. To assist managers in better achieving a flexible enterprise, a model on the basis of fuzzy logic is purposed to provide a means of measuring how flexible an enterprise is. In this approach, the performance ratings and importance weights of different flexibility capabilities assessed by experts are expressed in linguistic terms. The fuzzy logic-based measurement of flexibility can efficiently aid managers in dealing with both ambiguity and complexity involved in flexibility measurement. The fuzzy flexibility approach is an extension of the multicriteria decision making (MCDM) approach, in order to ascertain the efficiency of this method, a comparison study of the MCDM approach with fuzzy approach is proposed. The proposed scheme is illustrated through an example.