Evaluation of manufacturing lines in a mining industry by ANP and TOPSIS

Evaluating similar manufacturing lines considering a variety of criteria may help industry managers to examine performance of each manufacturing line according to different criteria. This may also lead to detect strength and weakness of each manufacturing line better. With evaluating manufacturing lines, industry managers may take necessary actions to better or eliminate weakness in each manufacturing line. The aim of the current study is to model the manufacturing lines evaluation decision-making problem as a multi-criteria decision-making problem and provide a five-step decision support framework to make and carefully assess the same manufacturing lines. The purpose of this paper is to develop an analytic network process (ANP) and technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) to evaluate manufacturing lines. ANP is used to compute the weight of criteria and TOPSIS is performed to calculate the final score of each manufacturing line, giving each manufacturing line a ranking. Proposed method in this paper has been employed to rank manufacturing lines in CMIC, they have been compared with each other according to 14 criteria. In conclusion, manufacturing line 9 ranked first on the list, according to the result, suitable performance in maintenance is the root cause for its high rank among others.