Integrating and utilizing AHP and GIS for landfill site selection

Abstract

Landfill site selection is a complex task that needs to be done by decision maker. There are many criteria that need to be considered before choosing the landfill. This includes economic, social, geological and environmental criteria. AHP is a technique for analyzing and supporting decisions in which multiple and competing objectives are involved and multiple alternatives are available. By using Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP), the process of landfill site selection had become easier. In this method, the problem need to be divided into hierarchy before the pair wise comparison and made it prioritize accordingly. Then, the judgment will be synthesized and finally, the evaluation and consistency of judgment were checked. As a result, lists of criterion were arranged according to its priority, which is more dominant to economic aspect and less dominant to social aspect. This is on account of social matters can be solved alternatively by different systems. This landfill site selection process involved lots of spatial data and strenuous in handling it. Thus, by using GIS, it can give significant helps to solve this issue because of its potential in handling large volume of spatial data that needs to be evaluates and processed. This particular research used Johor Bahru, Johor for case study area.