Abstract

These days one of the main concerns of transportation managers is inter-city communications. In this regard, supplying the required fuel for vehicles and consequently, suitable site location for fuel stations is considered a main issue. The location of fuel stations could influence human life tremendously, and even minor biases in selecting the location could lead to remediable losses. In today’s world, the overall demand for fuel consumption in large cities has been augmented due to the population boom. This issue, along with the scarcity of adequate spaces, creates hurdles for the construction of fuel stations. The solution to this problem can be found in the construction of small size fuel stations. To develop such stations, many parameters are considered. Among them are: vicinity to populated areas and fire fighting stations, the remoteness from green areas, and also other gas stations. Geospatial information system (GIS) as the science of analyzing positional information could assimilate multiple numbers of these parameters simultaneously. One of the great difficulties in this analysis is determining the most suitable process to give weight to parameters. The main concern of this paper is to introduce a model for positioning the optimum location of a small size fuel station with the help of GIS. In this model, the two methods for weighting spatial layers, fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) and analytical hierarchy process (AHP), are compared. Also, the results of different methods for integrating spatial layers such as Boolean, index overlay and fuzzy operators were compared. The location of this study is situated in Tehran, district 2, which is one of the most populated areas in the region. The collected spatial data was processed with GIS. Among various weighting methods, this study showed that FAHP is optimum. Index overlay also resulted in the best spatial layer integration.

Key words: Geospatial information system, Boolean logic, Fuzzy logic, Index overlay, fuzzy analytical hierarchy process.