ABSTRACT
With the growth of the population, the development of industrial, agricultural and so on, the amount of gas demand has been increasing steadily. Supplying the required gas energy often involves the construction of new power plants. The construction of power plants has social, economic, political and environmental consequences. Given the impact of power plant location in the cost of production and transmission of energy, environment, and so on, the importance of selecting the right place for the construction of the power plant is obvious. Therefore, in this study, geographical information system (GIS) based fuzzy-analytic hierarchy process (AHP) as one of the multicriteria decision methods and Dempster–Shafer theory (DST) methods are used to determine suitable locations for construction of gas power plant in Esfahan province, southwest of Iran. Different layers including distance to pipeline, distance to road, lithology, distance to stream, elevation, slope, and land use are prepared using ArcGIS. Subsequently, the importance of each factor in determining gas power plant location is defined using membership function. In the fuzzy-AHP method, membership function fuzzy maps for each layer are prepared. The DST model in Matlab is also used. The method was applied with three levels of confidence 99.5%, 99%, and 95% with the results compare. The results with the fuzzy method showed that 9.57% of the study area is unsuitable for the gas power location. On the hand, the results of the DST model showed that unsuitable areas for the DST method occupy 10.36%, 13.01%, and 19.55% of study area for levels of confidence of 95%, 99%, and 99.5%, respectively.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Shiraz University for providing financial support (238726-128) for this study.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Marzieh Mokarram
Marzieh Mokarram received the B.Sc. degree in natural source engineering, Rangeland and Watershed from Faculty of Rangelands and Watershed Management, Shahid Chamran University, GPA 18.04 from 20 (Top student with the 1st honor) in 2003 to 2007 and M.Sc. degrees in Remote Sensing (RS) & Geographic Information System (GIS) from Department of Remote Sensing & GIS, Shahid Chamran University-Ahwaz, GPA 18.44 from 20 (Top student with the 1st honor) in 2008 and 2010, and she has started her PhD in Geomorphology from University of Isfahan, GPA 19.24 from 20 (Top student with the 1st honor) in 2014. She is interested in the research field of GIS, RS and geomorphology. She is a faculty member in College of Agriculture and Natural Resources of Darab, Shiraz University, Iran.
Dinesh Sathyamoorthy
Dinesh Sathyamoorthy received the B.Eng. and M.Eng.Sc. degrees in computer engineering from Multimedia University in 2003 and 2006 respectively, and the PhD degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Universiti Teknologi Petronas in 2013. He is currently a senior research officer in the Science & Technology Research Institute of Defence (STRIDE), Ministry of Defence. He serves as Chief Editor for the Defence S&T Technical Bulletin, and editorial board member for the Malaysian Journal of Remote Sensing & GIS, as well as reviewer for several international journals and conferences. He is the Secretary of the Institution of Geospatial & Remote Sensing Malaysia (IGRSM), and a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), serving as committee member of the IEEE Geoscience & Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) Malaysia Chapter. His research interests include geospatial technologies and digital signal & image processing.