Selecting the Best Materials in the Manufacture of Automotive Polymer Parts with a Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Approach

Material selection is a complex issue in product design and development in a variety of engineering applications. Due to the intervention of multiple criteria related to material selection alternatives, manufacturers need the support of transparent tools to consider all criteria and goals at the same time to make complex decisions. The present research tries to provide a scientific algorithm for identifying and screening indicators of sustainable vehicle production and evaluation and ranking of consumables by combining multi-criteria decision-making techniques. For this purpose, in the first stage, after reviewing the experimental records of the research, the effective indicators on the choice of materials in sustainable production were determined, then using fuzzy Delphi method and a survey of 10 organizational experts, 5 indices included 29 sub-indicators were Sieved. In the second stage, by forming a matrix of pairwise comparisons and calculating the incompatibility rate and using the F.AHP technique, the weight of each index was extracted that the technical and economic indexes have the highest importance. Finally, in the next step, the identified materials were cases evaluated and ranking by the F.TOPSIS technique. In order to evaluate the capability of the proposed model, a case study was conducted that the results showed the combination of polypropylene and talc is the best polymeric material for car dashboard production that sensitivity analysis also indicates the stability in the research results.