A Comprehensive Method for Industrial Site Selection: The Macro-Location Analysis

Industrial site selection is a strategic decision that involves several criteria with consideration for technical, economic, social, environmental, and political issues. These criteria are generally described using a number of different indicators, expressed in quantitative and qualitative ways with some possible uncertainty. Decision making requires, therefore, appropriate tools to enable data collection, storage, analysis, fusion, and knowledge management to address this complex multifaceted scenario. This paper presents a comprehensive method for industrial site selection, an innovative approach for reasoning uncertainty and efficiently finding the most suitable solution based on a set of interacting decision support systems. Experimental results show that the proposed approach provides accurate results in the region of interest, coinciding with the choices of expert analysts.