GIS and AHP based modeling for landfill site selection (case study: west side of Mosul city)

Abstract

The accumulation of large quantities of solid waste inside Mosul city becomes a real residential and municipal management problem. There are many reasons including the existence of unplanned dumping sites within the city boundaries, and the absence of scientific researches which applies modern techniques for selecting the optimal solid waste landfill. This study uses geographic information system (GIS) and analytic hierarchical process (AHP) which is used to extract the weights with the help of Super Decision SD software. The studied variables data can be classified according to specified processing method into two types: continuous data, and discrete data. The ranking map has been designed after multiplying each variable with its extracted weight, then the final map has been created based on the values obtained from the ranking map. The results show that the optimal landfill area is located at south west Mosul city. This study aims at building a model by using GIS to determine the optimal and potential solid waste landfill site.

Keywords

• GIS
• Solid waste landfill
• AHP
• optimality