earticle

영어

Municipal solid waste (MSW) management is possible to be identified as one of the mostly cited fields in the optimization applications. This is because optimization of solid waste management is most general in contemporary research applications as the issue is being becoming more complex and impasse with rapidly increasing of urban population particularly in the developing world. Optimal site selection is to be identified as one of the famous facility location problems in the discipline of location science. With a range of growing impediments, such as scarcity of suitable lands for dumping, increasing of transportation and labour costs, diversifying of environmental pollutions etc, the application of optimization approaches on municipal solid waste management has been very famous among scholars and policy planners. The city of Colombo is a famous rapidly growing and propelling city in the South Asia. This is because many forms of internal migration flows can be seen into the city of Colombo. On this background, daily tonnage of solid waste accumulation has been augmented exponentially. At present, the issue has been become one of the burning dilemmas in the city. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to identify the potential, optimal and safe sites for SMW management in the city of Colombo by using GIS and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The study used mainly five criteria (Inhabited and build-up areas, Slopes, Elevation, Water bodies, and Road categories) and different constraints for each of them in terms of the optimal and safe site selection mechanism. The AHP approach is applied in order to obtain acute factor scoring and weighting scheme. Finally, the study used Weighted Overlay method in ArcGIS 10.2 environment for the optimal and safe site selection. The analyses of the results are revealed that six vacant sites are available and they are potentials to be used as optimal and safe sites for the MSW management practices. The study suggests that the preliminary sites investigations are needed to be done in order to clarify the ownerships and land valuation in advance.