Combining CRITIC Objective Weighting Method with CODAS and VIKOR Methods for Selecting Prospect Hospital Sites (Case Study: The Fifth District of Tehran)

Healthcare is one of the most important urban services and proper access to healthcare centers is critical. Determining the hospital’s prospect location is a difficult problem of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) and the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) improves this decision. In this study, integration of GIS and MCDM was used in order to determine the prospective location of the hospital in the fifth district of Tehran. For this purpose, firstly, the effective criteria in the process of determining the prospect location of the hospital was selected by reviewing the literature and expert's opinions, and the spatial layer of each criterion was prepared. Then, ten sites in this district were selected and the criteria values were calculated for each. Then, the criteria weights were determined by the Criteria Importance Through Inter-criteria Correlation (CRITIC) weighting method. Weighting results showed that the seismic vulnerability was the most effective criterion in the decision-making process. In the next step, the sites were evaluated and ranked by two MCDM methods, that is, the Combinative Distance-based Assessment (CODAS) and the Vlse Kriterijumska Optimizacija Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR), and the results showed the similarity of the performance of the two methods. The ranking results of the two methods showed that sites No. 7 and 1 were the most suitable and the most unsuitable place to build a new hospital, respectively. In order to evaluate the accuracy of the ranking, the ranking results of the two methods were compared with the ranking performed by experts. Evaluation of the accuracy of the methods showed that the CODAS method for selecting the prospect location of the hospital has higher accuracy than the VIKOR method.