Comparative study on efficiency of ANP and PROMETHEE methods in locating MSW landfill sites

For the municipal managers in the country the importance of locating suitable MSW landfill sites is twofold: firstly, to win the heart and mind of the people; secondly, to minimize the environmental impact of the landfill sites. AHP and Fuzzy methods are among the numerous methods that so far have been used together with GIS to locate and prioritize municipal solid waste (MSW) landfill sites. In the present study, after overlaying the maps in the GIS software and selecting the most suitable sites, Analytic Network Process (ANP) and Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMETHEE) were used to rank the selected sites. For this end, various information layers that contribute to the process of locating MSW landfill site including distance from rivers, distance from residential area, distance from faults etc. were evaluated by using ANP and PROMETHEE methods and based on some criteria and sub-criteria. Then, the evaluated layers were analyzed by GIS software in order to find the most suitable landfill sites and rank them. Results suggested that ANP + GIS was not only more accurate than PROMETHEE + GIS, but also it involves a user-friendly procedure in scoring the criteria and sub-criteria.