A geospatial solution using a TOPSIS approach for prioritizing urban projects in Libya

The world population is growing rapidly; consequently, urbanization has been in an increasing trend in many developing cities around the globe. This rapid growth in population and urbanization have also led to infrastructural development such as transportation systems, sewer, power utilities and many others. One major problem with rapid urbanization in developing/third-world countries is that developments in mega cities are hindered by ineffective planning before construction projects are initiated and mostly developments are random. Libya faces similar problems associated with rapid urbanization. To resolve this, an automating process via effective decision making tools is needed for development in Libyan cities. This study develops a geospatial solution based on GIS and TOPSIS for automating the process of selecting a city or a group of cities for development in Libya. To achieve this goal, fifteen GIS factors were prepared from various data sources including Landsat, MODIS, and ASTER. These factors are categorized into six groups of topography, land use and infrastructure, vegetation, demography, climate, and air quality. The suitability map produced based on the proposed methodology showed that the northern part of the study area, especially the areas surrounding Benghazi city and northern parts of Al Marj and Al Jabal al Akhdar cities, are most suitable. Support Vector Machine (SVM) model accurately classified 1178 samples which is equal to 78.5% of the total samples. The results produced Kappa statistic of 0.67 and average success rate of 0.861. Validation results revealed that the average prediction rate is 0.719. Based on the closeness coefficient statistics, Benghazi, Al Jabal al Akhdar, Al Marj, Darnah, Al Hizam Al Akhdar, and Al Qubbah cities are ranked in that order of suitability. The outputs of this study provide solution to subjective decision making in prioritizing cities for development