A public warehouses selection support system

Our software public warehouses selection support (PWSS) has two purposes: to select public warehouses according to several criteria and to exploit a database when some data are missing. It has been applied to a database of 280 Belgian enterprises, which are working in the fields of road transportation and logistics services providers. The database is organized as a four entries table: on rows, the enterprises are clustered by provinces and regions, and, on columns, items of information about the enterprises' warehouses are clustered into general topics. Such items are treated like choice criteria and topics like criterion families: i.e. buildings, customs, logistics and handling. Thanks to software PWSS, the user can make a multiple criteria selection of a subset of public warehouses fitting as well as possible his needs and preferences. He I can obtain too a multiple criteria ranking of warehouses based on a satisfaction index and a confidence index. This latter index measures his confidence in the results of his satisfaction index, its value depending on the importance he assesses to criteria with non-available data in the explored subset. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.