A methodological concept for material selection of highly sensitive components based on multiple criteria decision analysis

Material selection of highly sensitive components is one of the most challenging issues in the design and development of structural elements in aerospace and nuclear industry. This work compares some of the most widely potential multi-criteria decision making models for addressing all the stages in solving a material selection problem of highly sensitive components involving conflicting as well as multiple design objectives. For the first step, the compensatory models are discussed and employed to solve a multi-criteria material selection for a thermal loaded conductor in the presence of its required multi-functional characteristics. For the next step, using different versions of the non-compensatory methods examine the outranking approach to solve the same problem. The results are compared to each other to verify the effect of compensations and non-compensations in the methods and their sensitivity to ranking stability. It is of particular interest to see how different approaches of the Multiple Attribute Decision Making (MADM) models differ from each other when criterion of cost is a critical factor in the problem. The effect of individual attributes of cost criterion has been studied to ensure the reliability of the chosen candidate material by MADM models.