Interval Type 2 Fuzzy Z-AHP and Interval Type 2 Fuzzy-Z WASPAS: Selection of Industry 4.0 Sub-Technologies

Industry 4.0, indicated as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, has taken great attention in terms of the potential to reflect entire industries’ actions by transforming production to a fully automated and self-coordinated digital system. This transformation process necessitates a significant amount of investments and resources additionally, adaptation to the current operational technologies to new initiatives could be problematic. Besides that, companies have a limited budget to cope with the implementation costs of Industry 4.0 technologies. Thus, a systematic and extensive evaluation of the comparison between recent technologies and adaptable sub-technologies is required. This paper utilizes interval type 2 fuzzy z-scales in AHP and WASPAS methods to select one of the technology alternatives. Although there are many alternatives to Industry 4.0 sub-technologies, six of the most important are evaluated as alternatives according to related criteria. Alternatives are A1: Cloud-based ERP, A2: Real-time manufacturing tracking, A3: Robotic warehouse systems, A4: Virtualization in production environments, A5: Additive manufacturing for raw materials, and A6: Cyber security for safety manufacturing. Criteria are C1: Cost, C2: Risk level, C3: Resistance to change, C4: Complexity, C5: Effect on customer benefit. Under decision-makers’ evaluations, the results indicate that the most critical criterion is ‘Effect on customer benefit’. Decision-makers evaluate the six significant alternatives. It is hard to find essential options in practice. Therefore, ‘Virtualization in production environments’ and ‘Cloud-based ERP’ are the best two options, which have almost equal values.