A Multi-criteria Group Decision Making Approach for Rural Industrial Site Selection Using Fuzzy TOPSIS in Central Iran

Industrialization, beside the agriculture, is the most important alternative to diversify of rural economy and generate income and employment opportunities, especially in Third World. Appropriate location allocation for rural industrialization is the most feature of industrial decentralization towards regional and rural development. It needs considering uncertain criteria and conditions, which are often required to deal with subjective and imprecise assessments representing by fuzzy data. Using fuzzy TOPSIS methodology in a group decision-making context, the purpose of this article is to evaluate the rural industrial site selection in a central province of Iran. The procedure involves identification of potential locations, selection of evaluation criteria, use of fuzzy theory to quantify criteria values under uncertainty and evaluation and selection of the best location for implementing rural industrial sites. Applying the procedure on the set of 15 rural industrial sites of the study area, which 11 of them are operant and the else 4 ones are candidate to establish, revealed some in optimalities in selection of the sites. Although the first orders belong to some of the operant sites, some of the others have also last orders, whereas some of the candidate sites have the better situations and upper priorities. Therefore, the rational proceeding of the industrialization procedure in the rural study area entails some revisions in deciding and policy making for both of the operant and candidate rural industrial sites at the future.