Classification of Socio-economic Development Levels in Counties of West Azerbaijan Province, Iran by GIS and Multi-Criteria Decision Making

Human life's qualification has been changed and improved by the enhancement of the human knowledge. However, this growth and development have not been equal in all parts of human habitats. As the results of this situation many different social sections have been formed containing different economic qualities such as developed provinces in national level or developed and developing countries in international level. To manage this socio-economic condition, it is very important to have correct information about economic quality for development plans and the reduction of economic inequities. In this research socio-economic qualification of west Azerbaijan province was studied by GIS spatial analysis and Multi-criteria Decision Making (MCDM). The availability of GIS and multi-criteria decision analysis methods allows combining knowledge derived from different sources to support socio-economic planning and management. Methods such as fuzzy AHP and MCDM have been employed with success to model the socio-economic evaluation techniques but these methods still are not used in many developing countries such as Iran. The main objective of this research is to introduce GIS as a powerful technology in socio-economic development studies. For this to happen, socio- economic indexes are prepared in raster map format in the GIS environment. In the next step all of these GIS dataset layers, stored in Geo-database and have been standardized by Fuzzy logic model. Pixel value of these raster dataset layers were then calculated from 100 percent on the basis of some ingredient indexes such as area, density and population. In the next step Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) was used to generate standard weights for weighted overly and consistency ratio was calculated equal to 0.02. Finally spatial distribution of socio- economic parameters was evaluated in counties of west Azerbaijan province by multi-criteria decision making including Bolin logic, WLC, SAW and AHP. Result of this research showed that counties in west Azerbaijan province have different quality of socio-economic development level and all of them can be divided into 5 classes including Urmia at first class, and Khoy at the second class of economic quality. Also Oshnaveih and Chaldran were at last class of economic developing quality. Other counties have been midway and in under level of economic development.