Motaleate Shahri

Incorporating Emergency Response Consideration and Invironmental Impact Assessment to Determin Optimal Location of Urban Facilities and Services

V D; Z Y; E S

Volume 3, Issue 10 , May 2014, , Pages 37-48

Abstract

This research aims to deal with problems of material recovery facility (MRF) site selection. Since the right choice of a location will improve its performance, making a random choice will negatively affect public health and environment. This has led to a reconsideration of decision making methods. In ... Read More This research aims to deal with problems of material recovery facility (MRF) site selection. Since the right choice of a location will improve its performance, making a random choice will negatively affect public health and environment. This has led to a reconsideration of decision making methods. In this study, taking into account environmental concerns and the necessity of emergency preparation, the optimum location for the establishment of MRF in district 9 of the Municipality of Tehran was searched for using a combination of group decision making, multi criteria decision making, environmental impact assessment (EIA) techniques accompanied by emergency response planning (ERP) principles. To gain an all- inclusive perspective, the implemented decision making process of this study consisted of a two-stage analysis, beginning with an initial GIS based site screening using Delphi and fuzzy Delphi guided by a panel of experts in the site selection process followed by a pair-wise assessment of the suitability of five candidate sites applying fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP). Since the conventional decision making methods are incapable of handling uncertainty and vagueness involving the mapping of preferences to an exact number or ratio, this study applied fuzzy logic to overcome this problem. The proposed approach employed triangular fuzzy numbers to deal with the imprecision inherent to the process of subjective judgment. Fuzzy logic is a powerful mathematical tool for modeling uncertain industrial, environmental and social systems, and is a facilitator for common sense reasoning in decision making. Modeling using fuzzy sets has proven to be an effective way for formulating decision making problems where the information available is subjective and imprecise. In this research, information used in the FAHP was obtained from environmental impact assessment of MRF and principles of emergency response planning. The first stage analysis was successful in preliminary site screening leading to exclude the impermissible areas while retaining sufficient areas for further simultaneous evaluation. In the remaining regions, during second stage analysis, the FAHP method incorporated the information provided by EIA and ERP studies leading to fulfill the ranking of the five alternatives. The results indicated that “alternative A2”, the farthest proposed site from adjacent neighborhoods, is the most suitable site for MRF with a potential value of 0.33. The remaining alternatives are A3, A4, A5, and A1, with decreasing potential values of 0.27, 0.21, 0.11 and 0.08, respectively. Compared to other alternatives, A2 is more capable of meeting environmental, social and economic criteria due to its great distance from neighbors. This will mitigate the risk of emergency cases expansion into the neighborhoods. The other strength is that, A2 is close to Fatih highway and this facilitates access to the emergency response services. Thus, Delphi and fuzzy Delphi offered the means to identify five potential MRF sites based on well defined criteria, which were later ranked according to the preferences provided by environmental impact assessment and emergency response planning studies. FAHP offered the capacity to incorporate EIA findings and ERP principles in site selection which is critical in minimization of the negative effects of projects on public health and the environment. The proposed procedure was eventually proved useful in the case study identifying favorable areas for the establishment of material recovery facility. Moreover, research findings show that the proposed framework may aid in recognizing the pros and cons of potential areas for the localization of MRF sites in any urban region.

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Author = Z Y

Incorporating Emergency Response Consideration and Invironmental Impact Assessment to Determin Optimal Location of Urban Facilities and Services

Abstract