Abstract
Site selection for location of a hospital is one of the crucial policy-related decisions taken by the government. In upper Egypt, the cities suffer from a shortage and bad distribution of hospital site. The selection of the appropriate hospital site requires consideration of multiple alternative solutions and evaluation factor. We develop a Multi-Criteria Decision Support System (MCDSS) process that combines Geographical Information System (GIS) analysis with Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and use this process to determine the optimum site for a new hospital in the Aswan urban area. Based on actual conditions Aswan city, we used three main factors and seven sub-factors. The main factors are urban, environmental and economic factors. An application adopting AHP process was developed to calculate weights of every factor. Spatial analysis in GIS was used to overlay and generate factors maps and suitability evaluation map. All maps are classified from 1 (low suitable) to 5 (high suitable) using spatial information technologies. The candidate sites are divided by best, good and unsuitable hospital areas. Best hospital site represents optimal sites; good hospital site can be used as back-up candidate sites. The study was found that best area (S3) is about 30%, and most of these are located in the south part of the study area; good area (S2) is about 58%, and most of these are located in the central part of the study area; unsuitable area (S1) is about 12%, and most of these are located in the Eastern and Western parts of the study area. Finally, the study ends with an assessment of proposed sites.
Highlights
Many countries and institutions pay great attention to hospital site selection
We develop a Multi-Criteria Decision Support System (MCDSS) process that combines Geographical Information System (GIS) analysis with Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and use this process to determine the optimum site for a new hospital in the Aswan urban area
Because this study takes into account both environmental, economic and urban criteria, the process by which the model selects hospital sites is suitable for rapidly developing cities in developing countries
Summary
Choosing the location of a new service, such as hospital site, is an important decision-making problem for the urban planner and decision makers. Site selection is a kind of decision-making process that requires many criteria to be weighted and alternatives to be evaluated and ranked. GIS offers useful tools to solve site selection problem when considering spatial planning limitations. Spatial planning involves decision-making techniques that are combined with techniques such as MCDSS. Combining GIS with MCDSS methods creates the useful tool for spatial planning [2]. AHP is a powerful tool in MCDSS, especially in hierarchical decision-making. Siddiqui et al (1996) were the first to combine GIS and AHP procedure to solve site selection problem
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