Ranking of Suitable Areas for Establishing Industries in Kashan City Using VIKOR and TOPSIS Methods in Fuzzy Environment

A review of the historical trend of industrial site selection methods shows their increasing development. In this research, among the Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods, a combination of VIKOR and TOPSIS methods with fuzzy set theory has been used to overcome the uncertainty in the ranking of alternatives. The purpose of this paper is to locate the industries of Kashan city and rank the appropriate alternatives using Analytic Hierarchical Process (AHP) and the prioritization methods of fuzzy VIKOR and fuzzy TOPSIS. In this study, first, the effective criteria in GIS were examined and standardized according to fuzzy logic. Then, by presenting expert opinion through AHP, the criteria were weighted, and in order to determine suitable places for establishing industries, according to the required minimum area, six alternatives were extracted from the weighted linear combination method. Subsequently, the alternatives were ranked using fuzzy VIKOR and fuzzy TOPSIS methods. The sensitivity analysis was performed in the fuzzy TOPSIS method by shifting the criteria weights and producing different weighting scenarios. The fuzzy VIKOR method was analyzed for different values of the υ variable. Weighting of criteria by AHP showed that the distance from surface water with a weight coefficient of 0.200 is the most important one. The sensitivity analysis of both methods showed that 405 hectares in the Southeast of Kashan are the best ones to establish industries.