An approach to evaluate CAM software alternatives

Abstract

The selection process for the best computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software among a set of potential number of alternatives in market has been critical issue for most companies that aim to make their design/manufacturing-related activities automated. Because this selection process is very vital for companies because a wrong decision might put them into a difficult position in terms of economical, market share and time spent. Therefore, today's companies have used different multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods for the evaluation study of CAM software alternatives to make this complex process easily applicable and not time-consuming. Among the MCDM methods in literature, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method has been widely used for various MCDM problems in both academic researches and industrial practices. However, in some cases, because of the vagueness and uncertainty on the judgments of decision maker(s), the crisp pair wise comparison in the conventional AHP seems to be insufficient and imprecise to capture the right judgments of decision maker(s). Therefore, a fuzzy logic method is integrated in the pair wise comparison of AHP to make up for this deficiency in the conventional AHP, called as fuzzy AHP. Moreover, the proposed approach is also realized on a case study.