MULTIATTRIBUTE WAREHOUSE LOCATION SELECTION IN HUMANITARIAN LOGISTICS USING HESITANT FUZZY AHP

Deploying warehouses at strategic locations becomes an important issue for humanitarian relief organizations in order to improve their relief aid capability and rescue plan. The delivery of sufficient technical equipment and provision of shelter and reinforcement to victims is a significant event during relief operations. Warehouse location selection in humanitarian logistics (HL) is a challenging process because choosing a non-optimal location may cause additional problems during rescue activities. The conventional decision making tools used for a warehouse location selection problem tend to be less effective in dealing with the imprecise or vague nature of the linguistic assessment. In many situations, the values of the qualitative attributes are often incompletely determined by the decision-makers. The fuzzy set theory can capture this type of uncertainty. In this paper, a recent extension of ordinary fuzzy sets, namely hesitant fuzzy sets, is used for considering the decision makers hesitancy in the evaluation. To solve the HL warehouse location selection problem, we propose a new hesitant fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. We also present a HL warehouse location selection case study for a Turkish humanitarian relief organization by using hesitant fuzzy preference information.