TY - JOUR AB - Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to propose a variant of superiority and inferiority ranking (SIR) method called SIR‐Grey for determining the location of large‐scale harbour‐front project development.Design/methodology/approach– The study is illustrated with an application example obtained from the Environmental Protection Department of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to demonstrate the concept and application procedure of SIR‐Grey. The strengths and weaknesses of SIR‐Grey are highlighted when compared with the traditional weighted average approach.Findings– The strengths and weaknesses of SIR‐Grey are highlighted when compared with the traditional weighted average approach. Among the strengths, the global comparison scores of SIR‐Grey can give a clearer and easier comprehensible algorithm. Further, the global comparison generated from superiority flows (S‐flows) [S‐flow: A is preferred to A′(AP>A′) or A is indifferent to A′(AI>A′)] and inferiority flows (I‐flows) [I‐flow: A is preferred to A′(AP