Combining Multi Criteria Decision Making and Dempster Shafer Theory for Landfill Site Selection

This paper presents an integrated approach which utilizes multi criteria decision making (MCDM) alongside with Dempster Shafer Theory of evidence (DST) for the selection of landfill sites. It employs a two stage analysis for selecting landfill sites in urban region of Zanjan. The first-stage analysis makes use of the maps in Geospatial information system (GIS) in conjunction with different variables leading to support the second-stage analysis using the MCDM and DST as a tool. The purpose of GIS was to perform an initial process to eliminate unsuitable land followed by utilization of MCDM and DST method to identify the most suitable site using the information provided by the regional experts. Since it is not expected that all experts have the same information on the criteria, it is unavoidable to have uncertainty between expert’s view points. In this paper, for modelling the uncertainty in expert’s viewpoints, DST and analytical network process (ANP) have been implemented. Each expert’s view is regarded as evidence. These evidences are integrated by DST integration rule to get an individual weight for each criterion. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis was performed using Monte Carlo simulation where the decision weights associated with all criteria were varied to investigate their relative impacts on the rank ordering of the potential sites in the second stage. * Corresponding Author: Amir Hossein Tayyebi; [email protected]; phone:+98-937-2839196