Plant Location Selection in Natural Stone Industry

Determining the most convenient plant location is one of the commonly encountered problems in engineering applications. This paper presents an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model, which is developed for selecting the optimum plant location for marble/travertine factories in natural stones processing industry. The whole criteria which affect the decision making process in marble industry were determined to solve plant location problem in the AHP model. To determine optimum marble plant location for a new marble factory, which is planned to install by a mining firm located in the Eskisehir region in Turkey, an analysis was carried out by introducing the AHP method which is one of the well-known classical Multiple Attribute Decision Making (MADM) methods. This analysis shows that the AHP method can successfully be applied for the selection of plant location as well as any decision making process in natural stone industry.