Abstract—Urban development is the continuous process towards hillsides which has been a challenging issue for developing Asian countries such as Malaysia due to limited flat land. Therefore, it is very crucial that their location should be carefully chosen. The objective of this study is to develop Geographic Information System (GIS)-based land suitability analysis model considering accessibility for locating optimal sites to the hillside development against environmental threats and economic pull factor. In order to determine suitable site towards hillside, the important factors are incorporated, namely accessibility and topography, land cover, and economic by using multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) method in decision making process. In this paper, pair-wise comparison matrixes, consistency ratio by using analytic hierarchy process (AHP) as a multi-criteria analysis method. Priority weights were obtained in Expert Choice software. As the result, consistency ratio (CR) was obtained, where Scenario 1 Accessibility is 0.04 and Scenario 2 Environment is 0.07. The outcomes of this study will be land suitability model for hillside developments in Malaysia as well as other developing countries. Index Terms: Analytic Hierarchy Process, GIS, Land suitability analysis, MCDA.

Index Terms—Analytic Hierarchy Process, GIS, Land suitability analysis, MCDA.

Imtiaz Ahmed Chandio and Abd Nasir Matori are with Department of Civil Engineering, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Malaysia (email: imtiazutp@gmail.com; nasart@petronas.com.my).

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Cite: Imtiaz Ahmed Chandio, and Abd Nasir Bin Matori, "GIS-based Multi-criteria Decision Analysis of Land Suitability for Hillside Development," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 2, no. 6, pp. 469-473, 2011.