An Improved Delphi Method for Machinability Evaluation and Examination in Process Planning
Machinability evaluation and examination is fundamental for process planning¿while an effective weight method is one of the primary concerns of machinability evaluation and examination in process planning. In this paper, a new improved approach for calculating the weights of extracted indices in machinability evaluation and examination in process planning is proposed based on the conventional Delphi method [1]. The proposed approach is the statistical method that is applied to develop an algorithm for calculating weights of extracted machinability indices. The proposed method follows three steps: (1) extracted machinability indices are sequenced according to importance by domain experts; (2) the statistical values are obtained from the evaluation data given by these experts; (3) the weights of extracted machinability indices are calculated according to this approach. The new method in the paper provides one solution to the existing evaluation system. An application case is used to illustrate the process of calculation of weights of extracted machinability indices in machinability evaluation and examination in process planning.