Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems 30 (2016) 2223–2235 DOI:10.3233/IFS-151991 IOS Press 2223 Fuzzy ANP-based PROMETHEE II approach for evaluation of machine tool alternatives Funda Samanlioglu ∗ and Zeki Aya˘ g Department of Industrial Engineering, Kadir Has University, Cibali, Istanbul, Turkey Abstract. Machine tool selection process has been a critical issue for companies for years, since improper selection of a machine tool might cause many problems, affecting negatively the productivity, precision, flexibility and company’s responsive manufacturing capabilities. On the other hand, selecting the best machine tool from its increasing number of existing alternatives in the market is a multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem in the presence of many quantitative and qualitative attributes. Therefore, most companies have utilized various methods to successfully carry out this difficult and time-consuming process. In this paper, both of the most used MCDM methods; the Analytic Network Process (ANP) and PROMETHEE II (Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enriching Evaluations) with fuzzy logic (F-ANP and F-PROMETHEE II) are integrated to present a performance analysis on machine tool selection problem. The F-ANP method is used to determine the relative weights of a set of multiple quantitative and qualitative criteria, as the F-PROMETHEE II method is utilized to rank competing alternatives in terms of a set of evaluation criteria in order to reach to the final solution. In addition, a case study is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed approach for potential practitioners and readers. Keywords: Machine tool selection, fuzzy logic, multiple-criteria decision making, analytic network process, PROMETHEE II 1. Introduction A proper machine tool selection has been a very significant issue for manufacturing companies due to the fact that improperly selected machine tools can negatively affect the overall performance of a manufacturing system. In addition, the outputs of manufacturing system (i.e. the rate, quality and cost) mostly depend on the kinds of properly selected and implemented machines tools. On the other hand, the selection of a new machine tool is a time-consuming ∗ Corresponding author. Funda Samanlioglu, Department of Industrial Engineering, Kadir Has University, 34083 Cibali, Istan- bul, Turkey. Tel.: +90 212 533 6532; Fax: +90 212 533 4327; E-mail: fsamanlioglu@khas.edu.tr. and difficult process requiring advanced knowledge and experience. So, to carry out this process can be a hard task for engineers and managers, and also for machine tool manufacturer or vendor. For a proper and effective evaluation, the decision-maker may need a large amount of data to be analyzed and many factors to be considered. The decision-maker should be an expert or at least be very familiar with the spec- ifications of machine tools to select the most suitable among them. However, a survey conducted by Ger- rard [21] reveals that the role of engineering staff in authorization for final selection is 6%, and the rest belongs to middle and upper management (94%). Gerrard [21] also indicated the need for a simpli- fied and practical approach for the machine selection process. 1064-1246/16/$35.00 © 2016 – IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved