International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Research.

ISSN No. 2249-0019, Volume 3, Number 5 (2013), pp. 523-528

Research India Publications
http://www.ripublication.com/ ijmer.htm

A Framework for Evaluation of Material

Handling Equipment
S. Senthil1, G. Gurusaravanan2 , K. Amudhan3, and S.Chelladurai4
1,2,3,4

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kamaraj College of Engineering and

Technology, Virudhunagar- 626001, India.

Abstract
With the introduction of new technologies in the market, a variety of
machineries are used in construction industries. These machineries
reduce the manpower and working time, providing safe operations.
Selection of crawler crane is treated as a multi criteria decision making
problem as it involves several attributes. A multi criteria decision
making method known as Preference Ranking Organization Method
for Enrichment and Evaluation (PROMETHEE) is proposed for
evaluation of cranes. A case study conducted at metro tunneling
project at southern part of India demonstrates the applicability of the
proposed method.
Keywords: PROMETHEE; Cranes; Material handling.

1. Introduction
Many areas in city and suburbs not served by proper transport system. So, metro rail
project will be useful for reducing the traffic. In this, the construction works have been
completed with the help of various machineries such as cranes and piling equipment.
The construction works are carried for creating an underground passage, diaphragm
walls, tracks, etc. The different types of cranes are used in this station. They are
mechanical lift cranes, hydraulic lift cranes and hydraulic lift cranes with jib. The
hydraulic piling equipment is to be used for making a D-wall without any sliding of
soil by using polymeric material in powder form.
A crane is a machine for lifting and lowering a load and moving it horizontally,
with the hoisting mechanism and integral part of the machine. Cranes are driven
manually or by power. A crane is equipped with a hoist, wire ropes or chains, and

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sheaves, which can be used both to lift and lower materials and to move them
horizontally. It is mainly used for lifting heavy things and transporting them to other
places. It uses one or more simple machines to create mechanical advantage and thus
move loads beyond the normal capability of a man. A "crawler crane" consists of a
rotating superstructure with power plant, operating machinery, and boom, mounted on
a base, equipped with crawler treads for travel. Its function is to hoist and swing loads
at various radii. Crawler cranes have both advantages and disadvantages depending on
their use. Their main advantage is that they can move around on site and perform each
lift with little set-up, since the crane is stable on its tracks with no outriggers. In
addition, a crawler crane is capable of traveling with a load. The main disadvantage is
that they are very heavy, and cannot easily be moved from one job site to another
without significant expense. Typically a large crawler must be disassembled and
moved by trucks, rail cars or ships to its next location. In the present work,
PROMETHEE is employed to select the suitable crawler crane.

2. Literature Review
Decision-making problems usually imply the selection of the best compromise solution
.A lot of applications of PROMETHEE in various fields of science and technology can
be found in the literature (Behzadian, 2010). However, only a few applications are
found in the field of manufacturing such as, scheduling, maintenance planning
(Charaenusk, 1997; Cavalcante and De Almeida, 2007), manufacturing
system/technology selection (Anand and Kodali, 2008)), equipment selection
(Dagdeviren,2008), and production/ assembly planning strategies (Chen and
Liao,2003).Furthermore, the researchers had mainly focused upon the quantitative
criteria and had not effectively considered the fuzzy and/or linguistic criteria. The aim
of this present work is to demonstrate and validate the PROMETHEE method for some
decision making situations of valuating the three different types of crawler cranes.

3. Proposed Methodlogy
The Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluations
(PROMETHEE) is a recent Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method
developed by Brans (1982). This method is based on the positive and negative
preference ows for each alternative in the valued outranking relation to derive the
ranking of alternatives. The positive ow is expressing how much an alternative is
outranking the other ones, while the negative ow shows how much the other ones
outrank it. The essence of PROMETHEE methods is to provide the possibility for
alternatives pairs to be evaluated on an absolute scale with respect to dierent criteria
and to determine degrees of preferences, by using what we called generalized criteria.

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525

4. Application of the Proposed Methodlogy

In order to validate the proposed methodology, it was applied to a metro tunneling
project located in southern part of India. The total cost of the project is 14,600 Crores.
The total length of the platform is 140 m employing Automatic Train Protection (ATP)
controls. The first step in the selection process is to form a team of experts. The
various steps in the selection process are
Step 1: Collect the attributes influenced: The decision maker ideas are presented as
shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Values of crane selection attributes.

Attributes Boom
Working
Boom
length (m) radius (m) angle
(deg)
Hydraulic 34
8
84.3
Crane
Mechanica 33.5
6.1
81.8
l Crane
Jib Crane 39.6
10
79.4

Boom
point No.
elevation (m) parts
line
36.5
5

of Load
of capacity
(t)
33.11

34.91

41.9

40.6

10.8

Step 2: Find Weightage for each attributes. The weights wi of criteria have been
determined by the following equation.
M

i 1

Weightage, wi = 1 / Number of attributes

= 1 / 6 = 0.1667
Step 3: Find beneficial and non- beneficial attributes.
Beneficial attribute means the attribute which have maximum value and nonbeneficial attribute means minimum value attribute. The beneficial attributes are boom
angle; boom point elevation, load capacity, number of parts of line .The non-beneficial
attributes is boom length and working radius.
Step 4: Form the table for each attribute. In that tables, leave the diagonals empty
and put 1 if the first attribute is beneficial, otherwise it will be 0. A preference value of
1 is assigned if one alternative is preferred to the performance of another, with respect
to a specic criterion, without considering the magnitude of the performance
dierence. A preference value of 0 is assigned if the alternative is equal or not better to
the other alternative. Preference values are determined from the pairwise comparisons
and are then analyzed to develop an overall rating value for each alternative.
Step 5: Form the final table and Calculate positive and negative flow
Cell value = ( Weightage Corresponding cell value for all the attributes )

where -

Positive Flow, - Negative Flow

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Table 2: Positive and Negative Flow.

Cell value
Hydraulic Crane
Mechanical Crane
Jib Crane

Hydraulic Crane
~
(4*0.16)
(1*0.16)
0.8

Step 6: Find

from

Mechanical Crane
(2*0.16)
~
(1*0.16)
0.48

Jib Crane
(5*0.16)
(5*0.16)
~
1.6

1.28
1.28
0.32
~

above table and assign the rank in ascending order

Table 3: Net Flow.

Crane
Hydraulic Crane
Mechanical Crane
Jib Crane

-
0.48
0.8
-1.28

Rank
2
1
3

Step 7: From Table 3, the hydraulic crane is selected as the best choice when
compared to other cranes.

5. Conclusion
In this paper, we have analyzed the various types of cranes used in metro tunneling
project. A multi criteria decision making methodology that called Preference Ranking
Organization Method for enrichment and evaluation (PROMETHEE) was used for
evaluation of cranes. Since, the net flow is higher, mechanical crane is selected as the
best alternative when compared to other cranes.

Reference
[1]
[2]

[3]

G Anand and R Kodali (2008), Selection of lean manufacturing systems using

the PROMETHEE, Journal of Modeling in Management,3, 1, pp. 4070.
J P Brans, B Mareschal, and P Vincke (1984), PROMETHEE: a new family of
outranking methods in multi criteria analysis, Proceedings of Operational
Research, 84, pp. 477490.
M Behzadian (2010), PROMETHEE: A comprehensive literature review on
methodologies and applications, European Journal of Operational Research,
200, 1, pp. 198-215.

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[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

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