A Group Decision Making Approach for the Evaluation of Flexible Manufacturing Systems

In today's competitive global market, manufacturing companies extremely compete to produce products of the highest quality, the lowest cost, and the best customer satisfaction. The survival of a company depends on the capable of tackling with variations and adapting changing conditions. In this respect, flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) are capable of processing various parts, styles and quantities of production in manufacturing systems. However; it is quite complex process for firms to decide the appropriate FMS design as it involves multiple and conflicting criteria and multiple decision makers under various uncertainties. The fuzzy set theory offers an efficient tool to cope with vagueness and to define performance measurement of FMS in a multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) framework. In this study, we present a MAGDM approach based on hesitant fuzzy sets to evaluate FMS in a fuzzy environment. A practical example is also provided to demonstrate the proposed methodology.