A Multicriteria Approach for the Optimal Location of Gasoline Stations Being Transformed as Self-Service in Taiwan

Location selection significantly influences business success. In particular, location selection for the fuel stations is characterized by constraints on investment in facilities and by criteria that involve a series of social utilities. Recently, a leading fuel company in Taiwan initiated transforming its traditional gas stations into self-service. However, it is difficult to select an existing station to be transformed as self-service because there are many conflicting goals in the problem of location selection. In this paper, we apply a multicriteria approach, integrating analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and multichoice goal programming (MCGP), to obtain an appropriate gas station from many alternative locations that best suit the preferences of decision-makers in the case company. This study incorporates the weights obtained from AHP to set multiple aspirations in MCGP for ranking each candidate location. The results show that, under multiple quantitative and qualitative factors in the selection process, our proposed model is more scientific and efficient than unaided methods in finding a suitable location within a shorter evaluation time.