Decision Making in Evaluation and Selection of Launch Site with The Best and Worst Method

Abstract

Launch site location selection is a critical managerial and technical decision-making problem in the space industry. The criteria obtained from a massive amount of essential factors, considerations, and pre-requests provide input for the assessment process. The decision-makers evaluate many candidate launch site locations considering various aspects during the evaluation phase. The best worst method developed recently is a multi-criteria decision-making process proposed to evaluate the criteria' weights in this work. The weights of technical, commercial, and safety, which are primary criteria, and twelve sub-criteria are evaluated with the proposed method. The weights of the criteria and the importance of technical, managerial focusing factors are determined with the BWM. The results assist the administrators in selecting the best priority launch site. The best worst method provides reliable and usable results that are also consistent with the other evaluation. The uncertainties associated with the input parameters have been analyzed with the Ben-Tal best and worst methods. In a launch site for Turkey's illustrative example, Sinop is selected as the best priority launch site in Turkey's provinces, and Somalia is found the best-proposed launch site location among four candidates. Appropriately established launch site supports accessing space successfully.

Keywords

• Launch site
• Spacecraft launch
• Satellite launch
• Decision making
• Best and worst method

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