Comparison of Fuzzy-AHP and AHP in a spatial multi-criteria decision making model for urban land-use planning

Abstract

a b s t r a c tModern planning theories encourage approaches that consider all stakeholders with a variety of discourse values to avoid political and manipulative decisions. In the last decade, application of quantitative approaches such as multi-criteria decision making techniques in land suitability procedures has increased, which allows handling heterogeneous data. The majority of these applications mainly used decision-making techniques to rank the priority of predefined management options or planning scenarios. The presented study, however, shows how spatial decision-making can be used not only to rank the priority of options and performing scenario analysis, but also to provide insight into the spatial extent of the alternatives. This is particularly helpful in situation where political transitions in regard to urban planning policies leave local decision-makers with considerable room for discretion. To achieve this, the study compares the results of two quantitative techniques (analytical hierarchy procedure (AHP) and Fuzzy AHP) in defining the extent of land-use zones at a large scale urban planning scenario. The presented approach also adds a new dimension to the comparative analysis of applying these techniques in urban planning by considering the scale and purpose of the decision-making. The result demonstrates that in the early stage of the planning process, when identifying development options as a focal point is required, simplified methods can be sufficient. In this situation, selecting more sophisticated techniques will not necessarily generate different outcomes. However, when planning requires identifying the spatial extent of the preferred development area, considering the intersection area suggested by both methods will be ideal.

Spatial Modelling of Urban Physical Vulnerability to Explosion Hazards Using GIS and Fuzzy MCDA

“…Various methods have been proposed for calculating the consistency ratio in fuzzy AHP. One method is defuzzification of pairwise comparison matrix elements using one of the available methods and calculation of the consistency ration with the classic method [58]. In this case, a consistency ratio lower than 0.1 shows acceptable pairwise comparison with respect to the experts, (i.e., the experts' opinions have acceptable consistency with each other) [59].…”

Decision making under uncertainty using a qualitative TOPSIS method for selecting sustainable energy alternatives

“…Linguistic approaches have been widely used in MCDM methods in several fields such as power generation for trigeneration systems (Nieto-Morote et al 2010;Wang et al 2008;Chang et al 2008), life cycle impact assessment (Kara and Onut 2010;Cherubini and Strømman 2011), and urban planning (Chang et al 2008;Kowkabi et al 2013;Mosadeghi et al 2015), among others. In energy planning, different aspects of environmental assessments have been considered in various studies, and examples include: developing local energy sources to rank energy alternatives (Goumas and Lygerou 2000), evaluating water resources (Dai et al 2010), assessing renewable energy alternatives (Doukas et al 2007;Kahraman et al 2010) and finding optimal locations for energy projects (Aras et al 2004;San Cristóbal 2012;Yeh and Huang 2014;Afsordegan et al 2016).…”

A Hybrid Inexact Optimization Method for Land-Use Allocation in Association with Environmental/Ecological Requirements at a Watershed Level

“…For decades, various models have been proposed to support LUA [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. These models can be divided into three categories: mathematical models, intelligent models, and GIS-based spatial models.…”