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Top1. Introduction
Site selection involves measuring the needs of a new project against the merits of potential locations. The practice came of age during the 20th century, as governments and corporate operations expanded to new geographies on a national and international scale.
Edgar M. Hoover was one of the leading pioneers in the field of site analysis. In his book “The Location of Economic Activity”, Hoover compiled crucial criteria of industrial site selection as early as 1948. There were, however, some quite early attempts to combine theories of international trade with nationally oriented site theories in order to develop a site theory with an international perspective. One of these early authors was Ohlin (1952), followed by Sabathil (1969), Moore (1978), Tesch (1980), and Goette (1994).
Nevertheless, even to this day, this situation has only changed to some extent. Even though since the 1990s it has no longer been only major corporations that expand abroad, and any foreign direct investment results in a site selection, there are still very few well-researched studies on this topic. A specifically international site selection theory is still not discernible. Many current and more recent publications either review site decisions made by individual corporations or analyse them as reference cases. Other publications focus on a cost-specific approach largely driven by site relocations in the context of cost structure optimization within major corporations. However, these publications only rarely and at best cursorily deal with issues of construction and real estate aspects.
Theodor Sabathil’s (1969) dissertation is considered one of the early in-depth studies in the area of international site selection. Therein, Sabathil largely focused on country selection, which is part of the site selection process. In this context, Sabathil compiled a comprehensive catalog of site factors and a theoretical approach to site selection; the latter did not go into great detail. Neither did Sabathil take any legal, natural, or cultural site factors into consideration. However, he discussed, in particular, company-specific framework conditions and psychological factors.
In a study conducted in 2010 by Reynolds and Wood (2010) regarding the location selection studies with respect to retail firms, it was found that the conclusion conceived from site selection studies are not at all considered by the sector while making a selection regarding the installation of a new facility or relocation of an existing one.
In that study, a survey was conducted within 121 business entities in the United Kingdom and as per the survey result it was found that the main purpose for which location analysis was used in facility selection were financial decisions, relocation of individual stores, site screening selection, competitor analysis and catchment area identification. However, there was a lack of existing methodology for selection of a new location for the relocation of an existing facility.
The most common technique of site selection on or before 1998 was the experience followed by checklist and analog method. But after 2010 the expert systems, discriminate analysis and multiple techniques for single objective were identified as the most common techniques to select a site for retail farms.
Although many new techniques were innovated in the recent years and many new modifications were implemented in the existing methods, still the importance of site visits and detail data drive analysis was not devalued and always consulted before taking any decision.
Various literatures are there related to this field such as Hagen et al. (2017), Hernández-Padilla et al. (2017), Ivanov et al. (2017), Jin et al. (2017), Khan et al. (2017), Koleva et al. (2017), Lam et al. (2017), Li et al. (2017), etc. Some applications of Fuzzy AHP are Cheng (1996), IIbahar (2018), Kahraman (2003, 2004), Lee (2008), Leung (2000), Wang (2008), etc.