Economic Evaluation of Alternative CAD/CAM Systems: A Fuzzy Multi Attribute Decision Making Model

Summary

The adoption of a CAD/CAM system produces considerable global advantages, but their monetary quantification is extremely difficult due to their strategical nature as well as to their long-term performances.

Saaty’s Analytic Hierarchy Process has proved to be particularly suitable for evaluation of investments in advanced technology. The AHP, besides the tangible benefits, takes explicitly into account also the intangible ones, hierarchically organized. The main weakness of this methodology, however, is the fact that human judgments are expressed by deterministic values which are furthermore processed by mathematical techniques. Therefore the imprecision implicit in the assessment of the judgments is not duly considered. To overcome this shortcoming, some concepts of the Fuzzy Sets Theory are used in order to treat vagueness, ambiguity and uncertainty both of reality and of human judgments. A model to express pairwise comparison matrices by Fuzzy Numbers and to assess a rating and ranking of the alternative is proposed. An application to a real case of investment analysis alternative CAD systems is also discussed.