Electrical discharge machining is commonly used in manufacturing industry to make dies of complex cavities. This work investigates electric discharge machining of PH17-4 stainless steel when both graphite powder–mixed and surfactant-mixed dielectric fluid were used during electrical discharge machining. Taguchi method is used for conducting experiments with L9 orthogonal array by choosing electrical discharge machining process parameters, namely, peak current, surfactant concentration and graphite powder concentration. The process performance characteristics of electrical discharge machining such as material removal rate, surface roughness and tool wear rate are chosen for this study. The purpose of this work is to find significance of process parameters on performance characteristics and also get an optimal combination of these parameters using Taguchi-data envelopment analysis–based ranking multi-response optimization method.