A Courthouse Site Selection Method Using Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Term Set: A Case Study for Turkey

The selection of location is generally one of the utmost significant and considered decision for future success of a courthouse building. However, site selection is an important decision and is influenced by numerous causes both quantitative and qualitative for a courthouse, yet the topic is not studied academically in Turkey. As a first study in its field in Turkey, there were no previously established criteria set for courthouse site evaluation, accordingly, the US courthouse site selection documents are handled as the most improved and available decision set for selection criteria. These criteria are adapted by an expert group for Turkish circumstances mainly under 6 headings. The key criteria taken into account in this study are, 1-required site area/site coverage, 2-site location adjacencies, 3-traffic and transportation, 4-site acquisition cost, 5-environmental impact and sustainability, 6-physical elements such as topography and hydrology. Under these main criteria some additional sub-criteria are also included because of the structure of the problem. Since these criteria tend to be inexact or ambiguous nature of the linguistic assessment of courthouse location selection problem, hesitant fuzzy approach is applied to gauge the weightings of these criteria. Then, courthouse location weighting model is established and a case study is applied with the officials of the Turkish Ministry of Justice for a newly planned courthouse in Ankara, Turkey for site selection decision. This paper demonstrates an application of hesitant multi-criteria fuzzy logic to an actual courthouse location selection problem.