A method of relative Grey relation degree combined with combination weights for materials selection
Xiqin Wen1, 2 , Kaibo Wu2, Anhua Peng1, 2
1Engineering Training Center, Huaihai Institute of Technology, 59 Cangwu Road, Lianyungang, Jiangsu, China
2School of Mechatronic Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology, 1 University Road, Xuzhou, China
The quality and cost of a product rely heavily on suitable material selection, and therefore the ability to select the most appropriate material for a given application is the fundamental challenges faced by the design engineer. The general grey relational analysis (GRA) has three weaknesses, (i) the weight determination depends only on expert judgments, (ii) the qualitative indexes are simply quantified with exact numbers, and (iii) the general GRA only takes into account the relationship between the imaginarily best material and the candidate materials. Weights were determined by combining subjective and objective weights based on maximum deviation, the qualitative indexes were fuzzily quantified through trapezoidal fuzzy numbers (TFNs), and then ranked alternatives according to relative grey relation grade. The illustrative example showed that the results matched well with that using WAA and TOPSIS, proved the proposed method reasonable and trustworthy. And therefore the proposed method possesses important application values.