The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been widely used as one of decision-making method in economic, social, political and technological field, and for evaluating relative strength of preference quantitatively in decision making process. We think that AHP approach would be useful for analyzing and digitalizing expert’s skills, and for transferring to non-skilled people. In this presentation, we show the AHP approach to analyze a decision to select thermal spraying parameters for achieving high quality wear resistive Al 2 O 3 film by atmospheric plasma spraying (APS). From the result of this study, the process of expert’s subjective thinking could be clear and understood for other person.

We have already shown at ITSC2004 that the questionnaire results obtained from job shop small and medium companies in Japan. In this presentation, we would show the results obtained by analyzing questionnaire from the wiewpoint of cost. We show one example here. As for the companies think that their thermal spraying work is profitable rathen than other company's work, expert’s skill is more important for in-process monitoring during thermal spraying. However, as for the companies think that sales obtained from coating is less than that of other companies, they needed expert's skill when doing pretreatment. In this way, the result obtained from our questionnaire would be helpful for establishing company's technological strategy. Abstract only; no full-text paper available.