Multicriteria decision making based solution to location selection for modern agri-warehouses

Post harvest protection and storage of agricultural produces always presents challenge to agriculture economy. Decision for the proper location of an agri-warehouse for storage of agricultural produces is critical to solve such problem which involves multiple criteria like accessibility, distance from growing area and consumers, cost etc. Multi-Criteria decision making methods like ranking and rating are suitable to solve such problems. This paper presents an attempt to solve location selection problem for a modern agri-warehouse using a Multi-Criteria decision making (MCDM) approach. This decision can be taken more effectively if the criteria can be arranged at various levels forming a hierarchy and vagueness of the criteria are properly addressed. Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process used in this paper presents such an approach. Various criteria are chosen in the paper according to the variety of cases usually involved in such decision making then Fuzzy AHP approach is applied to rank three alternative locations for their suitability for storage of rice.