FMS SELECTION USING A DECISION MAKING APPROACH BASED ON FUZZY REGRESSION AND OPTIMIZATION

The use of advanced manufacturing technologies, especially flexible manufacturing systems, offers a great potential for improving manufacturing performance to compete in the global markets. This paper proposes a decision model based on fuzzy linear regression and optimization for flexible manufacturing system (FMS) selection. Fuzzy regression is introduced in the model to assess the vagueness of functional relationships among decision variables and to account for inexact data. A comprehensive example is presented to illustrate the application of the model developed in this paper.