METHODOLOGY FOR SELECTING A RATIONAL TECHNOLOGICAL PROCESS

The technical process is essential to industry and manufacturing innovation and progress in the current era of fast changing technology and the effects of Industry 4.0. The development of the technological process and its effective management are two of the most important stages of a product's life cycle in a manufacturing context. In addition to meeting the required specs and drawing, the finished product must be of the required quality, economical, and manufactured as quickly as possible. In the present paper, a methodology is proposed for selecting a rational technological process, providing a solution to the above problem related to ensuring the required workpiece quality. The methodology uses the FUll COnsistency Method - FUCOM for multi-criteria decision making, which is method for determining the weight of criteria through consistent pairwise comparisons, ensuring a high degree of consistency and reliability of results. The innovative feature of the proposed methodology is the incorporation of the FUCOM method for selecting a rational technological process, which has not been encountered before in mechanical engineering. The proposed methodology in this paper is applied and validated in the manufacturing of a thermal break nozzle sleeve for a 3D printer. Two technological processes are developed and compared using the rational process selection methodology, and as a result of their evaluation, the rational technological process among them is selected using the proposed methodology. The main contributions of the developed methodology are that it is easy and accessible, can be quickly implemented in a production environment, aims to reduce production defects, increase the number of suitable parts in a batch, increase productivity, provide the required quality parameters required at the design stage of the product. The methodology is focused on production processes and more specifically on specialists - technologists designing technological processes in enterprises.