WASPAS based MULTIMOORA method under IVIF environment for the selection of hub location

Low cost carriers (LCCs) have become one of the most significantly growing parts of the airline servicing market. This new player has redesigned the whole airline industry, which was previously led by the national/international full-service airline companies. Considering such advancements, the hub locations of LCCs became an important issue than ever before. Within this concept, a guiding framework is developed for an LCC company, which is in search of a new hub airport location within Turkey to satisfy the demand and attract new passengers.

An interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy (IVIF) sets based weighted aggregated sum product assessment (WASPAS) and multi-objective optimization by ratio analysis (MULTIMOORA) methods are developed for decision-making processes.

Five airport locations are evaluated using the developed method. Results showed that in determining hub locations for LCCs, potential number of passengers of the city, airport quality and the number of hotels within the city are obtained as the three most important criteria among 12 evaluation criteria. The best location for the LCC company is determined as Antalya Airport.

To apply the proposed method to a different set of alternatives, data gathered on comparing location of alternatives from experts should be updated.

Proposed hybrid framework is presented as the first time in the literature as a decision-making tool. In order to validate framework's applicability, efficiency and effectiveness, a comparison and a sensitivity analysis are conducted at the end of the study.