A Common Weight Data Envelopment Analysis Approach for Material Selection

Material selection is one of the major problems in manufacturing environments since the improper selected material may lead to fail in the production processes and result in customer dissatisfaction and cost inefficiency. Every material has different properties which should be considered as major criteria during the material selection procedure. Selection criteria could be quantitative or qualitative. Quantifying the performance measures of qualitative criteria is an inevitable issue in the multi criteria decision making (MCDM) problems. In this paper, the common weight data envelopment analysis (CWDEA) model proposed by Hatefi et al. [27] is applied for material selection problem which accounts for both quantitative and qualitative criteria in an effective manner. However, through a numerical example borrowed from the literature, it is shown that the proposed method by Hatefi et al. [27] is not able to produce a full ranking vector our problem. Accordingly, the problem is resolved under different normalization methods and the resulting ranking vectors are then aggregated by the linear assignment method.