Towards an objective decision-making framework for regional airport site selection

Abstract

Airport site selection requires consideration of several criteria constrained by complicated trade-offs. Airport literature and practice provide valuable insights in terms of influencing factors and multicriteria assessment methods, at the pace that reported siting processes follow non uniform decision-making structures. Current developments in geoinformation unveil a valuable opportunity of development of a structured methodology in the field of airport siting. Brazilian public sector decision-makers recognize that such methodology has the potential to improve the allocation of federal budget for new regional airports, in terms of implementation time and political friction. This research proposes a methodology termed MESA - Metodologia de Escolha de Sítios Aeroportuários (in Portuguese, Airport Site Selection Methodology). The purpose of MESA is to be sound under technical grounds and at the same time provide a more objective decision-making process. The proposed methodology consists of 4 phases: i) literature review of airport site selection criteria; ii) criteria systematization; iii) setting up of eliminatory criteria and their thresholds; and iv) setting up of scoring criteria and of an approach for their quantification. Eliminatory criteria reduce the original screening area, while scoring criteria are used for ranking purposes. MESA combines GIS (Geographic Information System) and classic AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) with direct assessment of alternatives through specific techniques. So far, the methodology has been applied to two real cases in the Brazilian context. In addition to effectively reducing subjectivity in airport site location decision, MESA has been demonstrating to be a powerful tool for mitigating environmental and social impacts associated to airport site selection. MESA is designed in such a way that simplifies improvements and adaptations, making it widely applicable.