Highway Corridor Routing using the Enhanced Participatory Analytic Minimum Impedance Surface (EP-AMIS) methodology
Keiron Bailey
Assistant Professor Organisation: University of Arizona
USA
Abstract
This paper describes the development of EP-AMIS. EP-AMIS is a participatory GIS/Multicriteria platform for the group-based evaluation of linear features.
Environmental, social, health, economic and engineering factors are all important considerations in pipeline, highway or power transmission line placement. These factors are complex and hard to commensurate. The AMIS (Analytic Minimum Impedance Surface) methodology developed by Bailey and Grossardt (2001, 2003) is the basis for EP-AMIS. The AMIS system integrates Analytic Hierarchy Process into a GIS-based platform, allowing for trade-offs to be made between competing landscape factors. Since AHP analysis allows dissimilar factors to be considered, AMIS integrates diverse features into the decision landscape using the summary criterion of impedance. This impedance represents net social cost, comprising both monetary and non-monetary assessment logics.
EP-AMIS develops the basic AMIS methodology for real-time, group-based analysis using advanced technologies. In focus groups, significant features are identified and grouped. Using electronic participatory polling technology values are elicited and compared for all significant factors. These values are integrated into the ArcView platform. EP-AMIS is a powerful and flexible platform. It allows a series of comparative analyses to be performed, including minimum net cost line from user-specfied origin to destination; corridor evaluation for user-specified ranges of net impedance and it can itemize net distances and impedances of each landscape feature covered by each alignment. EP-AMIS is a strong methodology with applications in group and/or public involvement in linear feature corridor evaluation and placement.