Chapter 30
Material Criticality Assessment
for Business Purposes Using Fuzzy
Linguistic Method
Xiaobo Chen, James Goddin, and Jacquetta Lee
Abstract A secure supply of raw materials plays a vital role in the rapid growth
of emerging technologies. The criticality assessment has been introduced to evaluate the supply risk of materials from economic, social and environmental aspects.
From business perspective, multiple critical metrics should be involved, so that the
decision makers can focus on the different metrics and put efforts to minimize the
corresponding risks. However, due to the complexity of assessment and uncertainties
in data sources, some metrics cannot be evaluated quantitatively, but qualitatively.
This paper introduces a fuzzy linguistic approach to evaluate multiple risk metrics for
material criticality assessment. The risk levels and the importance weight of metrics,
expressed in linguistic terms, are modeled by triangular or trapezoid membership
functions. We apply this method to evaluate the criticality of three materials: Cobalt,
Tungsten, and Yttrium. We use matrix operation to aggregate the MFs of the multiple
metrics in order to represent the overall criticality. As a result, the three materials
are ranked according to their critical levels. The proposed fuzzy linguistic approach
shows the advantage to evaluate the criticality with multi-criteria when only qualitative data is available. The membership function is an appropriate way to represent
linguistic terms with imprecision, which are commonly used to interpret risk terms.
The definition of multiple metrics provides flexibility for the users to choose risk
categories they are interested in, and the aggregation of the metrics supports them
to compare the criticality of materials. Further study may focus on how to justify
importance weight judgments to make tradeoff decision, or integrate temporal factor
to predict the future critical risk for business purpose.
Keywords Material criticality · Fuzzy linguistic method · Multi-criteria
aggregation
X. Chen (B) · J. Lee
Centre for Environment and Sustainability, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
e-mail: xi.chen@surrey.ac.uk
J. Goddin
Granta Design, ANSYS Inc, Cambridge, UK
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
Y. Kishita et al. (eds.), EcoDesign and Sustainability II, Sustainable Production, Life
Cycle Engineering and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6775-9_30
455
Material Criticality Assessment
for Business Purposes Using Fuzzy
Linguistic Method
Xiaobo Chen, James Goddin, and Jacquetta Lee
Abstract A secure supply of raw materials plays a vital role in the rapid growth
of emerging technologies. The criticality assessment has been introduced to evaluate the supply risk of materials from economic, social and environmental aspects.
From business perspective, multiple critical metrics should be involved, so that the
decision makers can focus on the different metrics and put efforts to minimize the
corresponding risks. However, due to the complexity of assessment and uncertainties
in data sources, some metrics cannot be evaluated quantitatively, but qualitatively.
This paper introduces a fuzzy linguistic approach to evaluate multiple risk metrics for
material criticality assessment. The risk levels and the importance weight of metrics,
expressed in linguistic terms, are modeled by triangular or trapezoid membership
functions. We apply this method to evaluate the criticality of three materials: Cobalt,
Tungsten, and Yttrium. We use matrix operation to aggregate the MFs of the multiple
metrics in order to represent the overall criticality. As a result, the three materials
are ranked according to their critical levels. The proposed fuzzy linguistic approach
shows the advantage to evaluate the criticality with multi-criteria when only qualitative data is available. The membership function is an appropriate way to represent
linguistic terms with imprecision, which are commonly used to interpret risk terms.
The definition of multiple metrics provides flexibility for the users to choose risk
categories they are interested in, and the aggregation of the metrics supports them
to compare the criticality of materials. Further study may focus on how to justify
importance weight judgments to make tradeoff decision, or integrate temporal factor
to predict the future critical risk for business purpose.
Keywords Material criticality · Fuzzy linguistic method · Multi-criteria
aggregation
X. Chen (B) · J. Lee
Centre for Environment and Sustainability, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
e-mail: xi.chen@surrey.ac.uk
J. Goddin
Granta Design, ANSYS Inc, Cambridge, UK
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
Y. Kishita et al. (eds.), EcoDesign and Sustainability II, Sustainable Production, Life
Cycle Engineering and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6775-9_30
455