Hospital Location Selection : An Application of Fuzzy AHP and Fuzzy VIKOR

Nowadays healthcare centers play a major role in improving human life quality, living standards and with improving them, residents become more and more conscious about their health. Besides, the ever-increasing urban population expands demand for new healthcare centers. Also, selecting a new healthcare center location is a crucial function of many urban planners and policy makers. In addition, this process is inherently complicated and time consuming. Furthermore, any fault in it imposes enormous cost on city budget. Decision makers have to evaluate and selecting the alternatives with respect to many quantitative and qualitative criteria under uncertainly. For these reasons, multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) has been find a good approach to improve precision of decision making and reduce waste of resources. Fuzzy logic was used for incorporating vagueness information into decision model. In this paper, two well-known MCDM techniques, including Analytical Hierarchal Process (AHP) and VIKOR were integrated. Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) is used to calculate the weight of each criterion, and Fuzzy VIKOR approach is proposed to prioritize alternatives from the best to the worst ones. This paper illustrates the process and results of a hospital location selection in Tehran metropolitan area, in Iran