A Comparative Analysis of Multi-criteria Decision-Making Techniques to Optimize the Process Parameters in Electro Discharge Machine

In today’s tremendous competitive market, industrial produce should possess high precision and quality and should be manufactured in minimal time. To obtain these objectives, the input parameters are controlled to attain the desired output depending on the conditions. The process parameters play a substantial role in defining the material removal rate as well as the surface quality. Based on its features, Electro Discharge Machine (EDM) is a striking alternative in the manufacturing industry. The effect of four process parameters (i.e.,) Voltage, Pulse-on-time, Current, Duty Cycle on the performance measures Material Removal Rate (MRR) and Surface Roughness (Ra) are studied based on the experimental results. Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) approaches support a decision-maker to pick the best substitute from a set of substitutes where the objectives are differing in nature. To establish the relative importance of the performance measures, entropy method is employed. The weights obtained using entropy method are MRR is 0.34 and for Ra is 0.66. Further, MCDM techniques, namely, MOORA, MULTIMOORA, and TOPSIS are used to attain the optimum process parameters. The optimum values are Pulse-on-time 100 µs, Voltage 50 V, Current 15 A, and Duty Cycle 50.