Developing location indicators for Agricultural Service Center: a Delphi–TOPSIS–FAHP approach

The main goal of this paper is to construct objectives and attributes of the service centers location problem. This problem is often found within production management as a location problem, when designing for example supply chains or manufacturing layouts. The main contribution of this paper is constructing related location indicators. Since there was no similar literature in this discipline, so a Delphi survey applied to quantify expert’s attitudes about location problem of Agricultural Service Center (ASC) and construct location selection attributes and also ASC objectives. A TOPSIS survey is done to rank extracted attributes to import in fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (AHP) study. Then a fuzzy AHP technique is applied to compute the weight of these most important attributes using four objectives, which obtained by Delphi technique too. In the simplest form with this assumption that all objectives have the same priority, the results illustrated that the service, cost, speed, and ASC profit are first to last important objectives, respectively. At the end of this paper, the multi-choice goal programming method recommended to use when the priorities of objectives are not the same. Finally, the weight of ASC location attributes computed to consider in ASC location problem.

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