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Sorting retail locations in a large urban city by using ELECTRE TRI-C and trapezoidal fuzzy numbers

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Abstract

Selection of a retail location is a strategic decision-making problem that involves the long-term commitment of resources. However, very often managers look for several candidate locations that can be incorporated in a business plan. In this article, a case study developed in a large Brazilian company is presented where managers required to identify a set of interesting locations in a context of imprecise and qualitative information. ELECTRE TRI-C is applied, a multi-criteria decision analysis sorting method in which representative reference alternatives are used to model preference ordered categories, a priori. Trapezoidal fuzzy numbers (TrFNs) are used as input in ELECTRE TRI-C, which allows: (1) imprecision and uncertainty parameters to be set in a very transparent way; (2) in the case of qualitative criteria, to define a category by providing information about reference alternatives in the form of the membership degree of verbal values, a feature that was not available so far in this method; (3) the outranking indices to be calculated such that the rationale of assignment rules is preserved; (4) the proliferation of fuzzy numbers to evaluate alternatives to be avoided, thus reducing the cognitive effort of the decision maker. TrFNs obtained in a previous analysis are used in the case study, thereby showing the advantages of the approach.

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Notes

  1. This application is based on a real case study developed in Rio de Janeiro (Araújo 2015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Ingeniería Industrial, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Campus Toluca, Eduardo Monroy Cárdenas 2000, 50110, Toluca, Mexico

    Javier Pereira

  2. IFPB, Campus João Pessoa, Av. Primeiro de Maio, 720 - Jaguaribe, João Pessoa, PB, 58015-435, Brazil

    Elaine C. B. de Oliveira

  3. IBMEC School of Business and Economics, Av. Pres. Wilson, 118, Room 1110, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 20030-020, Brazil

    Luiz F. A. M. Gomes

  4. Lojas Renner S/A, Rua Lauro Muller, 116, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

    Renato M. Araújo

Authors
  1. Javier Pereira
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  2. Elaine C. B. de Oliveira
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  3. Luiz F. A. M. Gomes
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  4. Renato M. Araújo
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Correspondence to Javier Pereira.

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This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors.

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Communicated by V. Loia.

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Pereira, J., de Oliveira, E.C.B., Gomes, L.F.A.M. et al. Sorting retail locations in a large urban city by using ELECTRE TRI-C and trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. Soft Comput 23, 4193–4206 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-018-3068-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-018-3068-2

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