Selection of vineyard location for a winery with fuzzy AHP and consistent fuzzy linguistic preference relations

Nowadays making decisions quickly and selecting the best alternative are very important for companies to gain competitive advantage in a complex environment. In this manner vineyard location selection problem of a winery is considered in this paper. Because this selection affects the quality of wine as the grape quality affects the wine quality directly. Selection of vineyard location is a multi-criteria decision problem and the conventional methods for selection problems are inadequate for dealing with the imprecise or vague nature of linguistic assessments. To overcome this difficulty, fuzzy multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods are proposed. This paper attempts to solve the vineyard location selection problem by adopting two methods: fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (fuzzy AHP) and consistent fuzzy linguistic preference relations. The proposed methods have been applied to a vineyard location selection problem of a winery in Denizli, Turkey. After determining the criteria and alternatives that affect the vineyard location decisions, these methods are used to solve the problem and results are presented. The similarities and differences of two methods are also discussed.