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Abstract: Ranking and selection of the optimal material is an important stage in the engineering design process. However, most of the methods proposed for ranking in materials selection have tended to focus on cost and benefit criteria, with target values receiving much less attention in spite of their importance in many practical decision-making problems such as selecting materials to best match the properties of human tissue in biomedical engineering applications. In response to this perceived gap, the development of a new normalization technique is considered in this paper that provides an extension of the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method and objective weighting in materials selection. There are four example cases included to validate the accuracy of outcomes from the proposed model. It is believed that the proposed decision-making model is suitable for linking to material databases and has the potential to enhance the efficiency of computer-aided materials selection systems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Materials selection is an onerous but very important activity in the design process. An inappropriate choice of material(s) can adversely affect the productivity and profitability and hence reputation of a manufacturing organization. The complexity of materials selection makes multi-criteria analysis an invaluable tool in the engineering design process. However, the application of various multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods can yield different results, especially when alternatives lead to similar performance. Therefore, an aggregation technique is proposed in this paper for optimal decision-making. In this approach, ranking orders obtained by various MCDM methods are used as the input of the suggested procedure and the outputs are aggregation rankings, which help designers and engineers to reach a consensus on materials selection for a specific application. An illustrative example is given to demonstrate the application of this procedure and its effectiveness in obtaining optimal materials selection. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]