Site suitability analysis using MacBeth and COPRAS in a case study of the cement industry under SCM implementation

Abstract

In the past two years, 2020-2022, the developing construction industry has been a huge issue according to the negative effect of Covid-19 with the increasing pandemic situation in cities and areas. In Covid-19 pandemic situation, the cement manufacturing industry has been crucial and needed more scrutiny. As cement is the second significant component after water in concrete and construction industry. Meanwhile, locating a cement plant in a special area of the city is challenging and affecting more by local communities and other involved environmental factors. The location selection decisions need to grow by environmental, economic, technical and social attributes. This study aims to present the site suitability decisions through a case study of locating a new manufacturing plant for cement production in Tehran surrounding, Iran. In this process, some required technical and tactical criteria are deserved for evaluating and suitability of the plant through decision-makers for cement manufacturing. All the feasible industrial alternative locations were evaluated under various criteria and regarding the Covid-19 pandemic’s negative impact to identify the most appropriate location for the cement industry. The authors proposed two Multi-Criteria Decision Attributes (MCDA) methods of MacBeth and COmplex PRoportional ASsessment (COPRAS) to evaluate and select the most suitable location for site suitability of the cement plant in this problem. Though the MacBeth method does not need to calculate weights of the Geographical Information System (GIS) criteria, the COPRAS method determined and used BWM (Best-Worst Method) as the weighing method. In sum, the comparison of the two methods was obtained according to the given results and ranks of volunteer cement suppliers for site suitability of the cement plant.