Abstract
Materials selection, as a essential link for manufacturing enterprises, has an important driving-force to comprehensively upgrade material properties and service life, especially in building and decoration fields. To qualitatively select the optimal green decoration materials, a hybrid multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach integrating analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and grey correlation technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (GC-TOPSIS) is proposed. The weights vector of hierarchical index structure, which is established based on interior environmental characteristics, i.e., physiological comfort, psychological satisfaction and interior environmental effect, is determined by AHP. GC-TOPSIS is applied to obtain the final ranking of green decoration materials to select the optimal one. A case study, i.e., 10 kinds of solid woods, is illustrated to validate the proposed method. Additionally, a sensitivity analysis of nine experiments is carried out to monitor the robustness of solution ranking to changes. The results proved that this method furnishes an rational and efficient decision support tool for performance assessment of green decoration materials.
1. Introduction
Material selection plays a significant role in the entire design and manufacturing process for diverse engineering applications, and it has attracted many researchers in recent years [1–5]. Improper selection of materials may negatively affect the performance and service life of products, even result in enormous cost of involvement and ultimately drive towards premature component/product obsolescence [6]. Current materials selection researches can be summed up in three major issues: construct a reasonable hierarchical structure based on various principles/criteria, prioritize and assign weights to relevant criteria, and assessment process of each material alternative. As an important strategy in the industrial system, it has been applied to various fields, especially in building and decoration fields [7,8].
5. Conclusions
Selecting the optimal green decoration material is a difficult and restrained task for the building field. This paper formulated a hierarchical structure with interior environment characteristics, i.e., visual, acoustic, tactile, olfactory architectural physics and living body, and presented a grey-correlation based hybrid MCDM approach that integrates AHP, GC and TOPSIS to handle the defects and deficiencies of single method. An empirical application of 10 kinds of solid woods was illustrated. The results of comparison with existing methods validated the accuracy and reliability for the proposed hybrid approach. In addition, the research of sensitivity analysis revealed that obtaining the weight of each criterion reasonably and scientifically plays a significant role in the selection of the optimal green material. Therefore, this grey-correlation based hybrid MCDM approach is an effective and accurate tool for green decoration materials selection.
