World appl. programming, Vol(5), No (8), August, 2015. pp.

113-119

TI Journals

World Applied Programming

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ISSN:
2222-2510
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Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) & Analytical Hierarchy

Process (AHP) Approach for Evaluating Tourism based on GIS
Maryam haghyghy *
Member of research board, Academic Center for Education, Cultural and Research, Rasht, Iran.

Mohammad Ghamgosar
Member of research board, Academic Center for Education, Cultural and Research, Rasht, Iran.

Reza Sheykhi
Academic Center for Education, Cultural and Research, Rasht, Iran.

Aryamen Ghavidel
Member of research board, Academic Center for Education, Cultural and Research, Rasht, Iran.
*Corresponding author: maria_haghyghy@yahoo.com

1.

Keywords

Abstract

FAHP
AHP
Multi-criteria decision making
GIS
Environmental assessment
tourism

As the environmental assessment has been used as a basis for decision making and planning of land use in all
parts of the world, this paper discusses two methods for land use attributes of land evaluation in order to
accomplish the best criteria of land use attributes performance for tourism & achieve sustainable development
in this area. Now a days high accuracy and speed of analysis are the achievement of using new methods and
technologies such as GIS and MCDM (Multiple criteria Decision Making). MCDM is the right tool for the
prediction of interaction between science and optimal utilization of land. Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process
(FAHP) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) as two tools of multiple criteria decision making especially
in the problems with spatial nature or GIS-based were selected to calculate weight and alternative evaluation.
Fuzzy environment is used for dealing with the problem rating and ranking of land attributes. There are
different criteria in characterizing real world for evaluating. This paper described the implementation of
FAHP and AHP that influences six specific land use attributes of the study are. This research finding shows
that the performance of dimension and sub dimension of attraction in order to choose the destination of land
use based on their preference and the suitable map of the area for tourism was prepared in GIS.

Introduction

Nowadays, tourism is one of the major service industries in the world. An investigation into travel behavior has to do for government planners to
get the answer about where to locate new facilities, what type of facilities, what kind of travel to promote including demographic issue and
tourist choice behavior [3]. However, tourism is fragile and vulnerable to external fluctuations. It is more susceptible to disasters, either natural
or human-involved [2, 22, 25, 26, 27].
This study presents fuzzy AHP as a proposed method for dealing with decision making in evaluating social attributes. Evaluation destination of
tourism is a wide ranging problem and complex. This problem requires method that can handle qualitative criteria [19] that are difficult to
describe in crisp values. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) can solve any complex problems by composing decision making problems into
several sub problems using AHP in terms of hierarchical levels among goal, attributes, sub attributes and alternatives [23].
GIS-based multi-criteria analysis is used in a wide range of decision and management situations like Environment planning and ecology
management, Urban and regional planning, Hydrology and water resources, Forestry, Transportation, Agriculture, Natural hazard management,
Health care resource allocation and etc. In GIS technology, usually the alternatives are a collection of point, line and aerial objects, attached to
which are criterion values (criterion map).
There have been different methods on multiple attributes decision-making (MADM) and the most known is Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP)
which especially is based on pair wise comparisons on a ratio scale [24] and fuzzy set theory [22] in order to select the best part of land use. The
integration between Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and Fuzzy Multi-criteria Decision Making (FMCDM) are employed to
recommend the best land based on their preference [5].
On the other hand, in incidence of environmental crises, destruction of resources and barriers in the way of obtaining sustainable development, It
is necessary to take place the development plan according to recognition and assess the development environment to access a suitable and
continuous utilization of environment also protection the natural values [8].
Like all types of development, tourism has positive and negative effects on the environment, culture and economy of the host society. So one of
the key strategies to minimize negative impacts and enhance positive impacts of it is land use planning considering the natural talent of the area
for the specified land use. Nature guides consistent with environmental talent of the land, as an effective tool and strategy, has a fundamental
role in sustainable development, improving living standards in human societies and obtaining natural balance [9].
The environmental assessment of a city in Guilan Province in north of Iran (Langarud) for tourism has been evaluated with analytic hierarchy
process (pair wise comparison of impact factors) and ArcGIS 9.3 and appropriate areas for tourism has been identified.

2.

Materials and methods

2.1 Study area

Langarud city has about 900 kilometers in extent and location of longitude 50 degrees 10 minutes and 30 seconds and latitude 37 degrees 11
minutes East region and is located in Guilan Province, and its distance is 60 km to the capital city of the province. Langarud is located in the

Maryam Haghyghy *, Mohammad Ghamgosar, Reza Sheykhi, Aryamen Ghavidel

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World Applied Programming Vol(5), No (8), August, 2015.

South cost of Caspian Sea. Langarud city has two terraces of topography; moderate to low mountainous in the south and south shores of the
Caspian Sea in the north. The highest point on the mountain is 1933 meters height above sea level and the lowest point is - 20 m height. City
gradient is variable between 0.5 to more than 50 percent which is been added with height of the beach to the mountains. The city is considered to
be junior at tourism according to development plan of tourism in coastal areas of Guilan and Mazandaran.

Figure 1. Study area location, Langrood city

2.2 Criteria evaluation

According to studies conducted in Iran, especially by [10, 14, 15] the most important criteria used to determine the suitability of land for
different uses in Iran, were recognized. With the base model of Dr.Makhdoom, the slope of the altitude, the elevation, aspect, land use, soil and
geology of the area was chosen as the effective factors.

2.3 Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

Evaluation of destination recommendation is a wide ranging problem. This problem requires method that can handle qualitative criteria that are
difficult to justify. Decision makers often find it difficult to accurately determine cardinal importance weights for a set of attributes
simultaneously. As the number of attributes increases, better results are obtained when the problem is converted to one of making a series of
pairwise comparisons. AHP formalizes the conversion of the attribute weighting problem into the more tractable problem of making a series of
pairwise comparisons among competing attributes[12].
AHP has been applied in many recommendations decision area. This method can be applied to solve many complex problems.The complex
problems are composed into several sub problems using AHP in terms of hierarchical levels among goal, dimensions (attributes), subdimensions (sub-attributes) and alternatives. Usually in AHP decision maker expresses judgments in terms of pair-wise comparisons on each
level of hierarchy with respect to their impact on the next level (from criteria to sub-criteria). Saatys AHP, is a well-known decision making
analytical tool used for modeling unstructured problems in various domain such as health, management, social and economic [10,14]. Saatys
scale is used to compute a numerical rating. The verbal judgments made by the decision maker are translated into numbers as utilized in Table 4
[9].
Table 1. Characteristics of soil units Langarud city
Soil unit code

Soil texture

Soil depth

1.3

heavy texture soils

Acidic soils of the semi-deep and deep uniform

1.5

heavy texture soils

Deep to semi uniform deep soil

4.1

Heavy fabric with colorful spots of iron oxide

Acidic soils of the semi-deep and deep uniform

4.2

heavy texture soils

Acidic soils of the semi-deep and deep uniform

5.3

Moderate to heavy texture with some color Mnqvth

Deep soil

6.1

Heavy fabric with lots of organic and Gleyic class with marine clays

Deep soil

6.2

Heavy texture with Gleyic class and the amount of organic material

Deep soil

7.2

Moderate to heavy texture on the sidelines of stream bed

Deep clay acidic soil

X.1

Moderate to heavy texture

Deep sandy soil

X.2

Dark to dark brown and lots of organic matter

Uniform deep sandy soil

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Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) Approach for Evaluating Tourism based on GIS
World Applied Programming Vol(5), No (8), August, 2015.

Figure 2. Soil classes map

Figure 3. Land use classes map

Table 2. Land use of Langarud city

Land use
Semi-dense forest
Thin forest
Rangeland
Dry land and irrigated agriculture
Residential area
Dense forest

Area - square cover

42/304558235
3/24593830
39/2198049
6/234645141
59/18092188
125389159

Area - hectare
82/3045
38/2459
8./219
51/2346
22/1809
92/12538

Table 3. Scales for pair wise comparison (Saaty, 1980)

variables
1
3
5
7
9
2,4,6,8

Preferences expressed in linguistic variables

Equal importance
Moderate importance
Strong importance
Very strong importance
Extreme importance
Intermediate values between adjacent scale values

In last step the relative weights of decision elements are aggregated to obtain an overall rating for the alternatives as follows:
jm

Wi s j 1 wijs w aj ,
s
Wi

wijs

i=1,, n

= total weight of site i,

= weight of alternative (site) i associated to attribute (map layer) j,

w aj

= weight of attribute j,
m = number of attribute,
n= number of site
Table 4. Matrix weighting of criteria

elevation
slope
aspect
soil
rock
Land use
sum

elevation
1
0.33
0.20
0.14
0.14
0.11
1.93

slope
3
1
0.33
0.20
0.20
0.14
4.88

aspect
5
3
1
0.33
0.20
0.20
9.73

soil
7
5
3
1
0.33
0.20
16.53

rock
7
5
5
3
1
0.33
21.33

Land use
9
7
3
5
3
1
28

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World Applied Programming Vol(5), No (8), August, 2015.

2.4 Fuzzy Environment Approach (FEA)

Fuzzy decision making is a method to solve complex decision making problem in a Fuzzy environment. Classical decision making method
works only with exact and ordinary data without qualitative data. Fuzzy can be used for vague and qualitative assessment of human beings [2].
This research used linguistic variable to express reasonably situation that difficult to define. The fuzzy number scale used as in Mon [17]. Table
5shows membership function of linguistic scales that has been applied in this study.
Table 5. Matrix weighting of criteria
Fuzzy number
~
1
~
3
~
5
~
7
~
9

Linguistic scale

TFN

Inverse TFN

Equal important

(1,1,3)

(1/3,1,1)

Weakly Important

(1,3,5)

(1/5,1/3,1)

Essentially Important

(3,5,7)

(1/7,1/5,1/3)

Very strongly Important

(5,7,9)

(1/9,1/7,1/5)

Absolutely Important

(7,9,9)

(1/9,1/9,1/5)

Triangular fuzzy number (TFN) is a fuzzy number represented with three points A=(l,m,u), Inverse TFN means reciprocal of a fuzzy number.
The theory of fuzzy sets has extended traditional mathematical decision theories therefore it can be employed with any vagueness problems.
Linguistic environment is used by human beings to make decisions [30]. The integration between FEA and AHP is suitable for handling decision
making problems in fuzzy environment [18].

2.5 Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

The algorithm for the proposed approach using FAHP has been developed in the following three phases. The first phase is rating part, the second
phase is aggregation part and the last phase is selection part [11]. According to studies conducted in Iran, especially by [10, 14, 15] the most
important criteria used to determine the suitability of land for different uses in Iran, were recognized. With the base model of Dr.Makhdoom, the
slope of the altitude, the elevation, aspect, land use, soil and geology of the area was chosen as the effective factors. According to the formulated
structure for evaluation of social attributes, the weights of the dimension hierarchy can be analyzed. The Pair-wise comparison matrices among
domain experts have been construct that can be seen in the Table 6.
Table 6. The Pair-wise comparison matrices

elevation
slope

elevation

slope

aspect

soil

rock

Land use

-1

aspect

soil

rock

Land use

-1

-1

-1

-1

-1

-1

-1

-1

-1

-1

-1

-1

-1

-1

The Fuzzy AHP method is a popular approach for MCDM .In this paper ,the extent fuzzy AHP is utilized, which was originally introduced by
chang[6 ]. LetA = (aij)mxn be a fuzzy pairwise comparison judgment matrix. Let Mij = (lij, mij, uij) be a triangular fuzzy number (TFN). The
steps of the Chang s extent analysis can be given as follows:
step1:The Value of the fuzzy synthetic extent with respect to the i-th object is defined by:

m
m
S M in 1 M
i
ij
ij
j 1
j 1

where represents fuzzy multiplication and the superscript 1 represents the fu zzy inverse.
The concepts of synthetic extent can also be found in Cheng [6 ] , Kwiesielewicz[13] and Bozda [4].

M ij

j 1

lij ,

j 1

j 1

mij ,

u
j 1

ij

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Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) Approach for Evaluating Tourism based on GIS
World Applied Programming Vol(5), No (8), August, 2015.

Subject to
m

M ij

j 1

i 1

i 1 j 1

i 1

j 1
ij ]

j 1

mij ,

i 1 j 1

lij ,

1
m

i 1

u
j 1 ij

ij

i 1 j 1

1
m

i 1

m
j 1 ij

1
m

i 1

l
j 1 ij

Step3: To obtain the estimates for the sets of weight values under each criterion, it is necessary to consider a principle of comparison for fuzzy
numbers [6]. To compare two fuzzy numbers S1 and S2, we need both the values of V(S1>=S2) and V(S2>=S1).

1 if
m 2 m1

V ( S 2 S1 ) 0 if
l1 u 2

l1 u 2

( m 2 u 2 ) ( m1 l1 )

otherwise

To compare Si and Sj both the values of V(Sj Si) and V(Si Sj) are required.
Step 4: We calculate the minimum degree possibility d(i) of
V(S S1, S2, S3 ., Sk),
= V[(SS1) and (SS2 ) and(SSk) ]
=min V(SSi) i=1, 2, 3, k

Assume that
d'(Ai)= min V(Si Sk);

For k = 1, 2,..n ; Ki

Then the weight vector is given by

W= (d(A1), d(A2),,d(An))T
where Ai (i=1,2,..,n) are the n elements.
Step 5: We normalize the weight vectors. That is as follows,
W= (d(A1), d(A2) .., d(An))T
where W is a non-fuzzy number

2.6 Analysis and Results

A numerical study is illustrated and real data is used for selecting the best island according to tourism domain experts preferences. Domain
experts in tourism can help tourists to evaluate effective factors in order to serve tourist the best recommendation based on their preferences. the
overall rating was obtained and shows in table 7.
The consistency property of matrices is checked to ensure that the judgments of decision makers are consistent. For this end some pre-parameter
is needed. Consistency Index (CI) is calculated as:

CI

max - n
n 1
Table 7. Weight ratio of factors
The factors

Weight of AHP

Weight of FAHP

elevation

0.302

0.375

slope

0.164

0.289

aspect

0.089

0.186

soil

0.059

0.129

rock

0.034

0.019

Land use

0.019

0.002

Maryam Haghyghy *, Mohammad Ghamgosar, Reza Sheykhi, Aryamen Ghavidel

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World Applied Programming Vol(5), No (8), August, 2015.

The consistency index of a randomly generated reciprocal matrix shall be called to the random index (RI), with reciprocals forced. An average
RI for the matrices of order 115 was generated by using a sample size of 100 [7]. The table of random indexes of the matrices of order 115 can
be seen in [24]. The last ratio that has to be calculated is CR (Consistency Ratio). Generally, if CR is less than 0.1, the judgments are consistent,
so the derived weights can be used. The formulation of CR is:

CR

CI
RI

Then the standard map of the study area according to assigned weight ratio and classification was produced in ArcGIS 9.3. To prepare these
maps topographical maps 1:25000 of Iran surveyor's company and image of the DEM was used to make slope map, aspect and elevation classes
the final composition and zoning was done according to final composition and determination of land use in both AHP & Fuzzy AHP methods.
One of the most important aspects of these two models results is comparison and matching with the existing condition and status of tourist
attractions that already exist in the region. In addition to determine the priority among land use, a major criterion is the current situation and land
use of the region [21].

3.

Conclusion

This study brings up a systematic approach and analytical means for tourism revival strategic marketing planning in tourism literature. In this
paper the application of multi-criteria decision making in spatial problems and GIS application is discussed and in resumption AHP and FAHP
as a most applicable tools in this context was introduced. According to the results of case simulation, the ranking order of weight of dimension
shows that tourism is concerned with elevation is the most important criteria for selection this evaluation. Based on AHP and FAHP results, we
found the importance of all factors are same in their orders but not in their weight.
Parameters used to evaluate the potential for ecotourism development in the ecological model in GIS shows that 28.24 percent of land area
equivalent to 12288.47 hectares is suitable zone to develop tourism in AHP method and 11890.7 hectares equal to 27.3 is suitable zone to
develop tourism in Fuzzy AHP method. This study shows the proximity of these two methods to determine suitable lands for tourism in this
location.
The compliance rate (CR) was calculated in this study, 0.083, respectively, which indicates the correctness of the evaluation factor. We intend to
distribute our method using the fuzzy TOPSIS and ELECTRE methods for tourism industry [1, 16, 20, 28, 29].

Figure 4. Map of suitable areas for tourism development in the region.(Left ;Achieved by AHP, Right ;Achieved by FAHP)

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Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) Approach for Evaluating Tourism based on GIS
World Applied Programming Vol(5), No (8), August, 2015.

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