Development of criterion weights for preliminary site selection: A pilot project of Supanburi industrial estate

Abstract

A generalized framework for criterion weights development was proposed for a pilot project of Supanburi industrial estate for light industries. It encompassed selection of criteria, questionnaire design, data collection, and data analysis. Relative or comparative importance matrix of the six factors was created from the summary of the data from expert survey. Pairwise comparison matrix was subsequently computed to reduce the data dimension and to highlight the relative importance of each factor prior to weight extraction. The highest weight was the distance to water bodies, which emphasized the importance given to natural features by experts. The framework should ease and enable adoption of multi-criteria decision-making technique for other cases of preliminary industrial estate site selection. Care must also be exercised to ensure the adequacy of quantities and quality of survey made as well as of data analysis protocol.

Keywords

• comparative importance matrix
• pairwise comparison matrix
• multi-criteria decision-making technique
• preliminary industrial estate site selection