A new fuzzy TOPSIS method based on left and right scores: An application for determining an industrial zone for dairy products factory

The selection of a facility location among alternative locations is a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problem including both quantitative and qualitative criteria. In more cases, in real word situations, determining the exact values for MCDM problems and especially for facility location selection problems is difficult or impossible. So, the values of alternatives with respect to the criteria or/and the values of criteria weights, are considered as fuzzy values (fuzzy numbers) so that the conventional crisp approaches for solving facility location selection problems and other MCDM problems tend to be less effective for dealing with the imprecise or vagueness nature of the linguistic assessments. In such conditions, the fuzzy MCDM methods are applied for solving facility location selection problem and other fuzzy MCDM problems. In this paper, we propose a new fuzzy TOPSIS method based on left and right scores for solving fuzzy MCDM problems. We apply the proposed method for solving three numerical examples. The first two numerical examples are proposed for the purpose of comparison. The third numerical example is a real application in which the selection is an industrial zone among several industrial zones for constructing dairy products factory. As a result, we found that the proposed method is practical for solving facility location selection problem and other fuzzy MCDM problems. Moreover, it seems that the proposed fuzzy TOPSIS method is flexible and easy to use and has acceptable accurate. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.