Multi-Criteria Decision Making for Plant Location Selection: An Integrated Delphi–AHP–PROMETHEE Methodology

Abstract

Selection of the appropriate plant location requires joint consideration of multiple alternatives and evaluation criteria because of the system complexity in manufacturing companies. Assessment procedures involve several objectives, and it is often necessary to compromise among possibly conflicting tangible and intangible criteria. Thus, multi-criteria decision making has been found to be a powerful and suitable technique to solve this type of location problem. In this paper, an integrated decision-making methodology is designed that employs the three well-known decision-making techniques, namely Delphi, analytic hierarchical process (AHP), and preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluations (PROMETHEE) in order to make the best use of information available, either implicitly or explicitly. In this respect, the aim of using the modified Delphi is to select the most influential criteria by a few professional experts or decision makers. The AHP is employed to analyze the structure of the plant location selection problem and to obtain weights of the selected criteria. Then, the PROMETHEE technique is taken into account to assess and rank the location alternatives. Finally, an application in a manufacturing company demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.