Facility Location Selection Using Fuzzy TOPSIS: Evidence from Cheng Hua Engineering

Choosing a manufacturing site is a classic multi-criteria problem: numbers and narratives matter, and both are often uncertain. Methods that rely only on crisp inputs struggle to reflect how managers actually judge trade-offs across cost, infrastructure, regulation, and workforce. To address this, we develop a fuzzy TOPSIS decision model that accepts linguistic assessments, aggregates them across criteria, and ranks candidate locations by their closeness to an ideal solution. This study ground the model in a Malaysian case (Cheng Hua Engineering), organizing the assessment around four dimensions operational efficiency, financial considerations, regulatory/environmental compliance, and workforce/social factors. The analysis identifies Rawang as the preferred site, narrowly ahead of Tanjung Malim, and a sensitivity check confirms the ranking’s stability under different weight settings. By integrating sustainability-adjacent concerns and handling ambiguity in expert judgment, the study offers a transparent, adaptable framework that decision-makers can reuse for strategic facility location choices in similar contexts.