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The paper deals with the situation of manufacturing of customized engineering products under intense competitive environment. Such customized engineering products can be manufactured by different types of production systems such as job production, batch production, mass production, and flexible manufacturing systems. It then becomes an important decision to choose the best one among these production systems which is also dependent on multiple criteria. The three basic criteria predominantly considered in the context of manufacturing are cost, quality, and flexibility. The paper applies the efficient interpretive ranking process (IRP) as an interpretive multi-criteria ranking method to demonstrate its utility in this context. It considers the design of the decision problem by treating the cross-interaction matrix of 'Alternatives × Criteria' as a unit matrix, i.e. each alternative is linked with each criterion. In this type of decision problem, the IRP method is implemented with transitive dominance relationships. Further, it carries out the sensitivity analysis concerning different ordinal weights of various criteria. The paper also makes a methodological contribution in IRP by way of computing dominance index rather than simply considering net dominance (which would be either positive or nil or negative). The dominance index gives a better depiction of the dominance of one alternative over the others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facility layout design, a NP hard problem, is associated with the arrangement of facilities in a manufacturing shop floor, which impacts the performance, and cost of system. Efficient design of facility layout is a key to the sustainable operations in a manufacturing shop floor. An efficient layout design not only optimizes the cost and energy due to proficient handling but also increase flexibility and easy accessibility. Traditionally, it is solved using meta-heuristic techniques. But these algorithmic or procedural methodologies do not generate effective and efficient layout design from sustainable point of view, where design should consider multiple criteria such as demand fluctuations, material handling cost, accessibility, maintenance, waste and more. In this paper, to capture the sustainability in the layout design these parameters are considered, and a new sustainable stochastic dynamic facility layout problem (SDFLP) is formulated and solved. SDFLP is optimized for material handling cost and rearrangement cost using various meta-heuristic techniques. The pool of layouts thus generated are then analyzed by data envelopment analysis to identify efficient layouts. A novel hierarchical methodology of consensus ranking of layouts is proposed which combines the multiple attributes/criteria. Multi attribute decision-making techniques such as technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution, interpretive ranking process and analytic hierarchy process, Borda-Kendall and integer linear programming based rank aggregation techniques are applied. To validate the proposed methodology data sets for facility size $$N=12$$ for time period $$T=5$$ having Gaussian demand are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]