Selection of handloom fabrics for summer clothing by AHP method of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques

Multi-criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is a very popular discipline of Operations Research (OR). It deals with the selection of optimal alternatives according to their preferential rank from all feasible alternatives/options under the presence of multiple (finite number of) decision criteria. Although MCDM techniques have wide range of applications in different areas including production and other engineering fields, their application in the domain of textiles is very limited. There is no reported attempt for ranking of fabrics and thereby selecting the best fabric for a specific application using MCDM methods. However, selection of best fabric for a particular end-use requirement, like for the purpose of summer clothing, in this case, is not a very easy task. Here, multiple criteria have to be taken into consideration while ranking the fabrics or selecting the best fabric. This is a typical situation which involves multi-criteria decision making (MCDM). In the present article, an attempt has been made to develop an index of handloom fabric quality, which should be a benchmark for choosing the handloom fabrics as summer clothing. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) of MCDM technique have been used here for ranking 25 handloom cotton fabrics in terms of their quality value considering their applicability towards summer clothing on the basis of three important comfort attributes namely drape coefficient, air permeability and thermal resistance.