Comparison of discrete multi-criteria decision making methods for selection of afforestation sites

This paper reports on a comparison of six Multi-Criteria Decision making Methods (MCDM) when used to rank sites for afforestation. ELECTRE III, PROMETHEE II, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Compromise Programming (CP), Stochastic Multi-criteria Accept- ability Analysis (SMAA-2) and Iterative Ideal Point Thresholding (IIPT) were applied to a ras- terized database containing a number of land units, with each land unit representing a group of spatially scattered pixels with identical land performance values. The 20 land units in the database were used as decision alternatives during the comparison. The decision criteria were five attributes expressing the biophysical and socio-economical performance of these land units 30yearsafterbeingcoveredbyPinuspatula.ThespecificquestionaddressedwiththeseMCDM was: “Which land units should be afforested with Pinus patula to achieve an optimal land per- formance 30 years after planting the trees?” The output of each method was a ranking of the land units, ordered in accordance to their multi-criteria performance. A certain degree of consistency was observed in the rankings produced by all MCDM. Specifi- cally, all methods designated the same four land unit as the most suitable alternatives, whereas only IIPT showed minimal differences regarding the least suitable land unit. Besides this, for all MCDM with the exception of IIPT, consistency was also observed in some intermediate po- sitions in the ranking, although for other positions the results produced by the MCDM did not exactly coincide. This inconsistency can be attributed to inherent particularities of the methods and to the specific values assigned to the parameters used in each of them.

Jaar van publicatie:2012

Toegankelijkheid:Open