A new synergistic strategy for ranking restaurant locations: A decision-making approach based on the hexagonal fuzzy numbers.

This research addresses the problem of restaurant locations ranking with applications for a cosmopolitan big city like Kolkata, India. A restaurant selection is based on occasions, spending capability, environment, location, comfort, quality of the food etc. In this research paper an exhaustive set of factors and sub-factors is taken into consideration to select and rank restaurants situated at different locations in the city of Kolkata with a population of around fifteen million. The ranking of restaurants depends on complex, conflicting qualitative attributes. In the paper hexagonal fuzzy numbers (HFN) have been used to suitably depict the imprecise uncertain environment. HFN, its distance measure and defuzzification have been applied to deal with the hesitancy and impreciseness of the decision makers. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been used as a Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) tool to obtain factors and sub-factors weights. TOPSIS and COPRAS methods were used for ranking different restaurant locations. Using comparative analysis it is shown that HFN with the TOPSIS and COPRAS method gives better result than other fuzzy numbers. The sensitivity analysis portion also gives a direction for taking a suitable decision in different possible scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]