AMIS: Development of a GIS/Multicriteria Corridor Planning Methodology
Keiron Bailey
Department of Geography and Regional Development
University of Arizona
Harvill Building Box #2
Tucson, AZ 85721
United States
Tel: 520 621 1652
Fax: 520 621-2889
kdbail1@uky.edu
Abstract
Highway corridor alignment presents a highly complex decision environment in which a variety of social, environmental and economic factors must be defined and weighted and tradeoffs evaluated. These data vary widely in format and quality. Stakeholders from various groups, often with competing interests, should be integrated into this process efficiently to determine objectives, to select data and then quantify the importance. Corridor planning is therefore an appropriate domain for the development and application of enhanced methodologies that conjoin multicriteria decision support techniques with the spatial analytic and presentation capacities of a GIS.
The Analytic Minimum Impedance Surface (AMIS) methodology is presented and its application to a real highway corridor location problem is discussed. AMIS features the structured integration of stakeholder input into a hybrid Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Emphasis is placed on handling AHP’s bias toward individual values and its limitations in preference magnitude ordering. The advantages of the AMIS approach are highlighted together with the significance of process design in building an effective methodology.
The application discusses how the various stakeholder inputs, including environmental, physical, engineering and socioeconomic concerns, were elicited and aggregated into the decision support model. Federal goals and priorities for road construction were explicitly incorporated into the model. Several AMIS outputs are displayed and evaluated.