A new fuzzy weighted average (FWA) method based on left and right scores: An application for determining a suitable location for a gas oil station

Abstract

The selection of a facility location from alternative locations is a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problem including both quantitative and qualitative criteria. In many real-life cases, 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) such 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, fuzzy MCDM methods are applied for facility location selection problem and other fuzzy MCDM problems. In this paper, we propose a new fuzzy weighted average (FWA) method based on left and right scores for fuzzy MCDM problems. Moreover, we apply the proposed method to a real application. As a result, we found that the proposed method is practical for facility location selection problems. Besides, it seems that the proposed FWA method is very accurate, flexible, simple, and easy to use when compared to other versions of the FWA method.