Sorting retail locations in a large urban city by using ELECTRE TRI-C and trapezoidal fuzzy numbers

Selection of a retail location is a strategic decision-making problem that involves the long-term commitment of resources. However, very often managers look for several candidate locations that can be incorporated in a business plan. In this article, a case study developed in a large Brazilian company is presented where managers required to identify a set of interesting locations in a context of imprecise and qualitative information. ELECTRE TRI-C is applied, a multi-criteria decision analysis sorting method in which representative reference alternatives are used to model preference ordered categories, a priori. Trapezoidal fuzzy numbers (TrFNs) are used as input in ELECTRE TRI-C, which allows: (1) imprecision and uncertainty parameters to be set in a very transparent way; (2) in the case of qualitative criteria, to define a category by providing information about reference alternatives in the form of the membership degree of verbal values, a feature that was not available so far in this method; (3) the outranking indices to be calculated such that the rationale of assignment rules is preserved; (4) the proliferation of fuzzy numbers to evaluate alternatives to be avoided, thus reducing the cognitive effort of the decision maker. TrFNs obtained in a previous analysis are used in the case study, thereby showing the advantages of the approach.