Does Criteria Weighting Improve Earthquake Relief Center Site Selection? A Comparative GIS-Based Multi-Criteria Analysis

Natural disasters such as earthquakes can suddenly create an urgent need for relief services and temporary shelter in urban areas. Selecting appropriate locations in advance is therefore an important part of disaster preparedness. However, suitable relief sites depend on several spatial, safety, accessibility, population, and infrastructure conditions, and different criterion weights may change the locations identified as suitable. This study examined this issue in District ۱ of Tehran using ۱۸ criteria. The criteria were mapped in GIS, and expert judgments were combined through triangular fuzzy aggregation to obtain their weights. We identified two sets of potential sites from weighted and unweighted GIS analyses. We assessed existing crisis-management sites separately using Shannon entropy and TOPSIS. We then evaluated the leading alternatives from all three groups using PROMETHEE. The results showed clear differences among the three groups. Unweighted GIS sites accounted for ۵۰% of the overall performance, compared with ۲۷% for weighted GIS sites and ۲۳% for existing crisis-management sites. In this study, the unweighted analysis performed better overall, showing that criterion weighting alone did not lead to better relief-center locations.

Keywords:

Emergency relief center site selection , Crisis management , Geographic Information System (GIS) , TOPSIS , PROMETHEE