Landfill Site Selection by Combining GIS and Fuzzy Multi Criteria Decision Analysis, Case Study: Bandar Abbas, Iran

Landfill selection in an urban area is a critical issue in the urban planning process because of its enormous impact on the economy, ecology and the environmental health of the region. With the growth of urbanization as well as the desire to live in cities, lager amount of wastes are produced and unfortunately the problem gets bigger everyday. With the development of Geographic Information System (GIS), the landfill sitting process is increasingly based on more difficult spatial analysis and modeling. In this paper, GIS and fuzzy multi criteria decision analysis (FMCDA) are integrated to solve the landfill site selection problem and to develop a ranking of the potential landfill areas based on a variety of criteria. Two stages of analyses are considered to form a spatial decision support system (SDSS) for waste management in urban region, Bandar Abbas. In the first stage, in order to find the suitable sites, GIS digital map overlay techniques are used. A proper waste disposal area is a function of many parameters including distance to urban and rural areas, distance to industrial and agricultural areas, distance to permanent and seasonal rivers, distance to faults, terrain slope, underground water level, transportation network, soil type, geology and both present and future land use of the area. The second-stage analysis uses fuzzy multi criteria decision-making (FMCDM) to rank different landfill sites for Bandar Abbas based on decisions given by a group of experts.