Selecting between CNC milling, robot milling and DMLS processes using a combined AHP and fuzzy approach

Recent advancements in manufacturing technology allow now a much wider selection of machining processes. Milling with industrial robots or additive manufacturing could now replace traditional milling performed on CNC machine-tools, for certain applications. This work presents a decision-making process for selecting between CNC milling, robot milling and a process of additive manufacturing (DMLS) for a certain class of parts. The AHP method was used for selecting between the three variants of manufacturing processes. The criteria used for AHP were divided into crisp ones and criteria described by linguistic variables. For the last ones, fuzzy inference systems were built to extract measurable information to be used for AHP. Finally, the proposed method was applied for a specific part.