A total distance ranking approach to fuzzy AHP-based MCDM method for selecting sustainable manufacturing facility location

Abstract

Selecting a sustainable facility location is a crucial strategy for manufacturing companies to achieve long-term success in today’s competitive environment. Various quantitative and qualitative criteria with different importance in a multiple level structure must be considered and aggregated to assist the company in decision-making.How to determine these criteria weights and select the sustainable manufacturing facility locations have become research questions. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes a total distance ranking approach to fuzzy analytic hierarchical process (AHP)-based multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) method.Currently, the membership functions of fuzzy weighted ratings in the MCDM with a multilevel structure cannot be developed. A ranking method is needed to defuzzify those fuzzy numbers used for fuzzy AHP and qualitative criteria in the MCDM for better executing decision-making procedure. The total distance ranking method related to the centroid on x-axis, centroid on y-axis and the distances of centroids point to the two tangent lines of a fuzzy number are considered in the proposed ranking approach. Formulas of the proposed approach will be presented, and some properties will be investigated to derive formulas for trapezoidal and triangular fuzzy numbers.A comparison with relevant ranking methods will be made to show the advantages of the proposed ranking approach.The proposed ranking approach is then applied to defuzzify the fuzzy numbers used in fuzzy AHP and linguistic values under qualitative criteria to obtain the criteria weights under multi-level structure and crisp values under qualitative criteria, respectively.The final scores of alternatives can be obtained by aggregating crisp criteria values and their corresponding weights by simple additive weighting method to obtain the ranking result. A numerical example will be conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed model. Finally, a comparison with Best-Worst method (BWM)will be presented to show the persuasiveness of the proposed method.