Decision-making method for the varieties of materiel's support equipment in development phase

There could be more than one candidate of the support equipments' varieties to accomplish all the maintenance support activities because support activity could be carried out by several different types of support equipments according to the results of maintenance task analysis. As a result, there is a need to conduct research on decision-making method to choose the best candidate of support equipment's varieties in the materiel's development phase. Firstly, four principles for establishing the decision-making parameter system were put forward, namely timeliness, deployability, economical, and versatility. Secondly, Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) was adopted to determine the subjective weights of parameters, and Entropy method was used to determine the objective weights. Further, the subjective and objective weights were combined as one by constructing an optimization model. Thereafter, the total score of each candidate was calculated and the best candidate of support equipment's varieties was selected which has the largest total score among all the alternatives. At last, an example was presented to prove the feasibility and validity of the method.