Combining the analytic hierarchy process and quality function deployment for a location decision from a requirement perspective

This paper combines analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and quality function deployment (QFD) techniques to support a facility location decision from a requirement perspective. The proposed approach begins by identifying location requirements, followed by the derivation of location evaluating criteria. Then, a central relationship matrix is established to display the degree of relationship between each pair of location requirement and location criterion for the QFD process. The AHP is used to measure the relative importance weighting for each location requirement. The importance degree and the normalised importance degree of each location criterion are then completed using the QFD transformation for constructing the facility location model. The AHP is used to assess the evaluating score for each candidate location for each particular location criterion. Finally, an overall score for each of the candidate locations is computed for the decision-maker to select the optimal location. An example is given to demonstrate how the proposed approach works.