COMPUTERS & INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING, cilt.52, sa.4, ss.414-433, 2007 (SCI-Expanded)
Industrial robots have been increasingly used by many manufacturing firms in different industries. While the number of robot manufacturers is also increasing with many alternative ranges of robots, potential end-users are faced with many options in both technical and economical factors in the evaluation of the industrial robotic systems. Industrial robotic system selection is a complex problem which many qualitative attributes must be considered. These kinds of attributes make the evaluation process hard and vague. Hierarchical structure is a good approach to describe a complicated system. This paper proposes a fuzzy hierarchical TOPSIS model for the multi-criteria evaluation of the industrial robotic systems. An application is presented with some sensitivity analyses by changing the critical parameters. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.