Comparison of multicriteria 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 produce a ranking of sites for afforestation. ELECTRE III, PROMETHEE II, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Compromise Programming (CP), Stochastic Multi-criteria Acceptability Analysis 2 (SMAA-2) and Iterative Ideal Point Thresholding (IIPT) were applied to a rasterized 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 considered the alternatives of the decision problem. The decision criteria were five attributes expressing the biophysical and socio-economical performance of these land units 30 years after being covered by Pinus patula. The specific question addressed with these MCDM was “Which land units should be afforested with Pinus patula to achieve an optimal land performance 30 years after planting the trees?” The output of each method was a ranking of the land units based on their multicriteria performance. A certain degree of consistency was observed in the rankings produced by all MCDM. Specifically, all methods designated the same four land units as the most suitable alternatives. Similarly, all methods produced virtually the same results regarding the four least suitable alternatives. Furthermore, for all MCDM with the exception of IIPT, consistency was also observed in some intermediate positions of the rankings, although for other positions the results 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:2014

Toegankelijkheid:Closed