Facility location selection using fuzzy axiomatic design principles under group decision-making environment

Choosing the most suitable site for carrying out operations of any manufacturing or service organisation is a typical facility location selection problem. Selecting a location for a new organisation or expansion of an existing one is a crucial decision for its eventual success or failure. This paper presents a fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method based on axiomatic design principles for solving facility location selection problems under group decision-making environment. The group of decision makers is assumed to be homogeneous where the degrees of importance (reliability) of all decision makers are taken to be equal to each other. The decision of selecting an appropriate facility location for a distribution centre, manufacturing set-up, commercial complex or any public organisation always involves consideration of many socio-economic criteria which can be more effectively expressed in qualitative terms. Trapezoidal fuzzy numbers are used here for representing those qualitative criteria into quantitative values. The location alternatives are ranked based on the ascending values of their total information content. Two illustrative examples are solved applying the adopted method to validate its universal applicability and acceptability as an almost accurate and comprehensive MCDM tool. A sensitivity analysis study is also performed.