Titanium nitride (TiN) is a widely used industrial hard coating material, known for its excellent hardness and chemical stability. However, its relatively high coefficient of friction (COF) often leads to interfacial heat accumulation and adhesive wear during service, limiting its applicability in high-temperature tribological environments. To enhance its tribological performance, a TiN–WS₂ soft–hard composite coating was fabricated on cemented carbide substrates using reactive co-sputtering magnetron deposition. By adjusting the sputtering parameters and target power ratio, a synergistic deposition of the hard (TiN) and lubricating (WS₂) phases was achieved and compared with a pure TiN coating. The results revealed that the incorporation of WS₂ significantly reduced the COF at both room temperature (25 °C) and an elevated temperature (200 °C), with the average values decreasing from 0.61 to 0.39 at 25 °C and from 0.53 to 0.36 at 200 °C. A white light interferometry analysis showed that the TiN–WS₂ coating exhibited narrower wear tracks and less surface damage than TiN at elevated temperatures, demonstrating superior friction-reducing and wear-resistant capabilities. In terms of mechanical properties, the composite coating showed a reduction in the hardness, the reduced elastic modulus (Er), and the adhesion strength by 27.3%, 19.8%, and 9.5%, respectively, compared to pure TiN. These findings indicate that the introduction of a quantitatively controlled lubricating WS₂ phase allows for a balance between nanoscale hardness and wear resistance, offering promising potential for engineering applications under complex working conditions.

The automotive industry is a key pillar of many national economies, and automotive body manufacturing is among the most complex production processes. In the automotive body manufacturing process, quality control and safety assurance are of paramount importance, directly influencing the overall safety performance, structural reliability, and comfort of vehicles. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze the primary factors that influence quality and safety during the car body manufacturing process. The study first focuses on four key processes of car body manufacturing—stamping, welding, painting, and assembly—using the man, machine, material, method, environment (4M1E) framework to analyze the factors affecting quality and safety. Subsequently, a quality and safety early-warning indicator system is established for the automotive body manufacturing process, followed by a comprehensive analysis of the constructed system. To address the issue of subjectivity in traditional technique for order of preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) evaluation methods, this paper employs the coefficient of variation method for objective analysis of criterion-level indicators, the trapezoidal fuzzy number method for subjective analysis of criterion-level indicators, and establishes a model for optimizing target weight that balances subjective and objective approaches. Furthermore, a relative entropy-based method is applied to comprehensively evaluate criterion-level indicators. This approach reduces the information loss associated with separate weighting schemes and overcomes a known limitation of traditional TOPSIS—its inability to distinguish alternatives that lie equidistant from ideal solutions. Finally, an evaluation model for quality and safety influencing factors in body manufacturing is developed and validated through a case study, demonstrating its feasibility. The results show that the proposed model can effectively identify the key quality and safety influencing factors in the automobile body manufacturing process, guarantee quality control and safety assurance in the body manufacturing process, and thus ensure that the automobile production process meets the quality and safety requirements.