Conveyors and automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are important mechanical handling equipment used to transport loads from one place to another. Selection of proper material handling equipment is an intricate process. In the present paper two material handling equipment selection problem was solved using various newly developed multi criteria decision making (MCDM) methods. First a conveyor selection problem with six conflicting criteria and four alternatives was solved using four MCDM methods, i.e. combinative distance based assessment (CODAS) method, evaluation based on distance from average solution (EDAS) method, weighted aggregated sum product assessment (WASPAS) method and multi-objective optimization on the basis of ratio analysis (MOORA) method. Second an automated guided vehicles selection problem with six conflicting criteria and eight alternatives was solved using CODAS, EDAS, WASPAS and MOORA methods. Spearman rank correlation coefficient was calculated between the ranks obtained by various methods. The ranks obtained by these methods were even compared with the ranks of other MCDM methods and it was found that the relatively new methods CODAS, EDAS and WASPAS were in good agree-ment with each other.

In real world multi criteria decision making (MCDM) problem, it is tough to solve a decision matrix with vague and imprecise data. The degree of impreciseness depends on the kind of data avail-able. For interval valued data this impreciseness is less and interval-valued MCDM methods can be effectively used to solve the problem. A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) selection prob-lem was taken into consideration to find the best FMS among available alternatives. An interval extension of CODAS method is proposed in this paper which was used to solve the problem along with two other interval-valued decision-making methods i.e. interval-valued TOPSIS, interval-valued EDAS. All the three methods are distance-based approaches and it was found that the interval-valued CODAS method gave the exact same ranking with that of interval-valued TOPSIS and interval-valued EDAS.