Site Selection of Temporary Flood Resettlement Centers Based on Integration of Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Methods and Optimization Algorithm (Case Study: Mazandaran Province)

The selection of an optimal and appropriate place for temporary accommodation of people affected by natural disasters, such as flood, has long been of concern to Crisis Management Planners. Failure to properly locate these centers may result in heavy damage. The objective of the present study is to determine appropriate places for establishing temporary post-flood settlement centers in Mazandaran province. In order to achieve this objective, firstly, effective criteria for locating temporary accommodation were determined and the standard maps were prepared and normalized. In the present study, nine criteria for locating temporary accommodation centers have been applied. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method has been applied to weigh the criteria by availing experts’ opinions and studying related articles. In the next step, in order to incorporate the criteria according to the weights calculated by the method of AHP, the method Weighted Linear Combination (WLC) was applied and the final map was categorized into four classes of “very appropriate”, “appropriate”, “not appropriate” and “very inappropriate”. In conclusion, the location of temporary post-flood settlement centers with respect to demographic points was considered in the two classes of “very appropriate” and “appropriate” from the previous stage using the P_Median function in the genetic algorithm. The algorithm searches for 15 locations among the candidate points for temporary accommodation. The centers are located in higher populated areas in two classes more desirable than other classes.