Land use suitability analysis using an approach combining GIS, regionalization, and PROMETHEE II

Abstract

ABSTRACTLand-use Suitability Analysis, which aims to identify the suitability of a given area for a particular use by using a certain number of criteria, is a domain that has received a lot of attention from researchers during the last 20 years and most of the works that have been proposed rely on the use of multi-criteria methods which are based on a complete aggregation of alternatives such as Weighted Linear Combination (WLC). The outranking methods, which are multi-criteria methods that rely on a partial aggregation of alternatives, have rarely been used. In the context of Land-use Suitability Analysis, outranking methods quickly reach their computational limits because they require performing comparisons between each pair of pixels. To reduce the initial number of alternatives, we propose to proceed to the regionalization of the study area by grouping neighbouring pixels that have similar properties in homogeneous zones. We then use PROMETHEE II (Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment of Evaluations), an outranking method whose objective is to rank a set of alternatives from the best to the worst. A study for the choice of a landfill site was carried out using our approach and the obtained results were compared with those of WLC.

Keywords

• Land-use suitability analysis
• constrained regionalization
• agglomerative hierarchical clustering
• average linkage clustering
• PROMETHEE II