A Comparison of Fuzzy AHP and Ideal Point Methods for Evaluating Land Suitability

Abstract

This article compares two fuzzy approaches to land suitability evaluations, Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Ideal Point. The methods were evaluated using a case study which models the opportunities for wheat production under irrigation conditions in the north‐western region of Jeffara Plain, Libya. A number of relevant soil and landscape criteria were identified through a review of the literature and their weights specified as a result of discussions with local experts. The results of the Fuzzy AHP showed that the majority of the study area has membership values to the set of suitability between 0.40 and 0.50, while the results of the Ideal Point approach revealed most of the study area to have membership values between 0.30 and 0.40. While the Fuzzy AHP and Ideal Point approaches accommodate the continuous nature of many soil properties and produce more intuitive distributions of land suitabilities values, the Fuzzy AHP approach was found to be better than Fuzzy Ideal Point. This was due to the latter's tendency to be biased towards positive and negative ideal values.

Multiattribute Decision Analysis Methods

“…The terms ideal point method and compromise programming are sometimes used interchangeably. For example, Carver (1991) and Pereira and Duckstein (1993) have used the concept in their GIS-based ideal point method and compromise programming, respectively (see also Tkach and Simonovic 1997;Santé-Riveira et al 2008;Ligmann-Zielinska 2009;Elaalem et al 2011). To avoid confusion, we distinguish between these two terms.…”

Assessing Active Living Potential: Case Study of Jacksonville, Florida

“…Because of missing "walking opportunity", a fuzzy membership is employed during the rasterizing process. The fuzzy membership tool allows for specifying the likelihood that a given value is a member of a set rather than just deciding if the value is either inside or outside the set [52,53]. In other words, as the distance from a grocery store decreases, a person is more likely to walk to it, so the locations are more likely to be members of the suitable set.…”

Land suitability evaluation for irrigating wheat by Geopedological approach and Geographic Information System: A case study of Qazvin plain, Iran

“…In many cases, especially in semi-arid areas, accessing to usable agricultural land is an important limitation. It increases pressure on available land and in turn, it leads to land erosion and degradation (Elaalem et al, 2011). Therefore, it seems necessary to perform an accurate and reliable assessment of the land in order to take a decision on the processes involved in the development of land use policies.…”