India had broken all the records and counts of confirmed COVID-19 cases per day and daily death toll reached over thousands. India is way far from other developed nations in the number of vaccine doses per 100 population. Although vaccination is an effective measure to be followed to overcome this grave situation, still certain misconceptions and rumors throughout the country have pulled a decent part of the population from being vaccinated. Another big challenge is production and supply of vaccines to meet the demand. COVID-19 pandemic will not end until the entire population gets vaccinated that would protect them from this deadly disease. Therefore, this paper aims at clearly identifying the factors and subsequently prioritizing them as barriers in effective immunization against COVID-19 in India following multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) technique. In this study, a fuzzy decision-making trail and evaluation laboratory (F-DEMATEL) approach is applied for understanding the contextual relationship among the barriers for effective immunization against COVID-19. The methodology is followed in a fuzzy environment to address the issue of uncertainty in the data gathered. The result suggests that the ‘Misinformation/ Misconceptions/ Lack of vaccine education in underserved communities’, ‘Lack of information regarding a vaccination center close to home’, ‘Difficulties in getting appointments’, ‘Supply chain issues in the distribution of vaccine’, and ‘Lack of access for marginalized communities’ are the important barriers in effective immunization against COVID-19. Recommendations have been made to overcome this situation and help to immunize the population and drag COVID-19 down to earth.

An enormous amount of heat is released at the contact surface during machining of a component/partdue to friction, rubbing action and cutting forces generated. Cutting fluids are generally applied to provide lubrication and cooling at the tool and workpiece interface. They also play a beneficial role in machining operations, and enhance job shop’s productivity, tool life and quality of the finished parts/products. In addition to these, they act as an important contributor in optimizing a machining operation. However, a cutting fluid suitable for a particular machining requirement may not be equally good for other applications and hence, there is a need for selection of the appropriate type of cutting fluid with a view to facilitate superlative and uncomplicated machining operation. Several factors, such as material ofthe cutting tool, operator’s safety, compatibility with the machine tool, reliability and rancidity of the cutting fluid, and cost may all combine to limit the effectiveness or applicability of a cutting fluid. Therefore, the present study explores the potentiality of a modified similarity-based method, which is a multi-criteria decision making tool, in solving cutting fluid selection problems. To illustrate the procedural steps of this method, two real time problems are solved. The results obtained highly corroborate with the opinions of the experts in the related field, demonstrating the applicability of the said method.

With the progress in technology and innovation in product development, the contribution of computer- aided design (CAD) software in the design and manufacture of parts/products is growing on significantly. Selection of an appropriate CAD software is not a trifling task as it involves analyzing the appositeness of the available software packages to the unique requirements of the organization. Existence of a large number of CAD software vendors, presence of discordance among different hardware and software systems, and dearth of technical knowledge and experience of the decision makers further complicate the selection procedure. Moreover, there are very few published research papers related to CAD software selection, and majority of them have either employed criteria weights computed utilizing subjective judgements of the end users or floundered to incorporate the voice of customers in the decision making process. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a well-known technique for determining the relative importance of customers’ defined criteria for selection of any product or service. Therefore, this paper deals with design and development of a QFD-based decision making model in Visual BASIC 6.0 for selection of CAD software for manufacturing organizations. In order to demonstrate the applicability and potentiality of the developed model in the form of a software prototype, two illustrative examples are also provided.

Non-traditional machining (NTM) refers to a variety of thermal, chemical, electrical and mechanical material removal processes, developed to generate complex and intricate shapes in advanced engineering materials with high strength-to-weight ratio. Selection of the optimal NTM process for generating a desired feature on a given material requires the consideration of several factors among which the type of the work material and shape to be machined are the most significant ones. Presence of a large number of NTM processes along with their complex characteristics and capabilities, and lack of experts in NTM process selection domain compel for development of a structured approach for NTM process selection for a given machining application. Thus, the objective of this paper is set to develop a decision-making model in Visual BASIC 6.0 to automate the NTM process selection procedure with the help of graphical user interface and visual decision aids. It is also integrated with quality function deployment technique to correlate the customers’ requirements (product characteristics) with technical requirements (process characteristics). Four illustrative examples are also provided to demonstrate the potentiality of the developed model in solving NTM process selection problems.