GIS-based multicriteria evaluation approach for corridor siting

Siting a linear facility such as a highway or a pipeline often requires a preliminary study in which one or several corridors are identified. Here we construct corridors as a collection of adjacent polygons specifying a ‘path’ from origin <i>s</i> to destination <i>t</i>. Formally, we make use of a graph, called the connectivity graph, in which vertices correspond to polygons and edges to adjacent polygons. Within this formal representation, a corridor corresponds to an <i>s</i> to <i>t</i> path in the connectivity graph. The corridors are evaluated on two criteria: (1) a quantitative criterion measuring the length of the corridor, and (2) a qualitative criterion measuring the quality of the corridor with respect to the suitability of crossing its component polygons. We first introduce a three-phase approach based on a coupling between a geographical information system (GIS) and multicriteria evaluation and devoted to handling biobjective corridor siting problems. Then, the proposed approach is validated through an example of a real-world application. <br> <br><b>Keywords: </b>GIS, corridor siting, multicriteria evaluation, spatial analysis, multiobjective shortest path