Development of a Decision Support System for a Performance-Based Landfill Design: Coupling GIS and System Simulation Models

Designing environmentally safe and economically feasible landfills can be a challenging engineering task due to complex interactions that need to be taken into account between landfill size, waste and site characteristics. Performance-based landfill design enables the selection of the most appropriate design components and design details of a landfill to obtain the best overall performance with respect to preset performance criteria considering the system (design) variables. Decision support systems (DSS) are among the most promising approaches to handle such complexities and to facilitate the performance based landfill design providing efficient and cost-effective solutions.