Decision-making integrated information technology (IIT) approach for material selection Issam S. Jalham Industrial Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering & Technology, University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan E-mail: jalham@ju.edu.jo Abstract: In this investigation, a decision-making IIT approach for materials selection has been proposed. This approach consists of three phases which are the preselection, selection, and postselection and techno-economic phases. This approach diers from other approaches in taking into consideration the economic and business issues factors. Going from one phase to another, a number of the candidate materials are eliminated step by step until the optimum material is reached. This approach was also translated into a computer programme which consists of the complementary work of the modules that have screening properties. A case study was presented to test the proposed model and good results have been obtained. Keywords: ®gure of merit; information technology; material selection; phase; screener. Reference to this article should be made as follows: Jalham, I.S. (2006) `Decision-making integrated information technology (IIT) approach for material selection', Int. J. Computer Applications in Technology, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp.65±71. 1 INTRODUCTION The material selection process operates in two distinctly dierent areas of engineering applications. Firstly, it is an indispensable part of any new-product development project; in addition, it has an important role in the review and re-evaluation of existing products and their performance with regard to cost and reliability. Secondly, the material selection process has to ensure compliance with the design speci®cations and proven service requirements (Alexander and Appoo, 1977). Hence, eective material selection in design is crucial to the creation of successful products (Dodd and Fairfull, 1989). The increasing number and types of materials result in increased possibilities in the choice of selecting the right-material (Field and De Neufville, 1988). An improperly chosen material can lead not only to the failure in the part in service, but also to unnecessary cost. Thus, selecting the best material for a part involves more than selecting a material that has technical properties to provide the necessary service performance. It is also intimately connected with the economic factors of the processing of the material into ®nished product, in addition to the cost of the raw material. Using the known classical approach, materials were selected from handbooks with limited choice and on the basis of limited property data (Dieter, 1991). For example, Ashby (1997) based his material selection criterion on the role of material in mechanical design, while Shackelford and Alexander (2000) continued the classical work by establishing a new standard for handbooks in terms of layout and design. The most recent developments in this area are the computer-based material selection softwares. Dargie et al. (1982) proposed a computer-aided preliminary selection system, MAPS-1, which is similar to the part classi®cation code used in group technology. Based on this method the programme generates a list of candidate combination of materials and processes to produce the software. But when the list of possible materials and processes is too large, an intermediate selection process is required to reduce the list of candidate materials. Expert systems, or so called knowledge-based systems were used to simulate the reasoning of human experts in this ®eld of knowledge. Moreover, the `The Material Selector on CD-ROM' (Waterman and Ashby, 2000) is used to provide information on engineering materials and related processes of component manufacture. The main selection factors can now be divided into technical properties such as mechanical, physical, chemical, thermal and dimensional; availability which Int. J. of Computer Applications in Technology, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2006 65 Copyright # 2006 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.