A decision-making methodology for material selection using genetic algorithm

Material selection is a challenging task for designers due to the immense number of different materials available today. Choosing the right materials plays an important role in numerous engineering applications because an inappropriate selection of materials can significantly affect the performance of the final product. As a result, a number of techniques have been proposed to select materials in the engineering design process. However, most of the proposed systems are knowledge intensive and cannot deal with the situation where the information of weight criteria is incomplete or unknown. So, in this paper a logical approach is presented for choosing an optimal material by employing the genetic algorithm. The proposed material selection procedure reduces the personal bias for assigning the weight of different attributes. Seven examples are included to demonstrate the applicability of the suggested approach. The findings of this work provide the insights for further researches on more complicated design problems such as simultaneous material selection and geometry optimisation.