USING THE ANALYTIC HIERARCHY PROCESS AND GIS FOR DECISION MAKING IN RURAL HIGHWAY ROUTE LOCATION

Rural highway route location is a very complex case, requiring significant time and effort from the planners. This study presented the route location method by applying Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Geographical Information System (GIS). The location of the study is confined to south Mosul city in Iraq of the area (198km2). The researcher is behind defining the route which connects Baghdad-Mosul and Mosul-Kirkuk roadways. This route is considered the suggested turn to Mosul city. A variety of data set from different sources and at different scales are managed. A questionnaire has been made with a group of decision makers and specialists in designing and constructing roadways to point out the relative importance of location criteria that was done by following pairwise comparison after building a hierarchical framework to evaluate the criteria. The relative importance is found as follows: land use (23%), water resources (26%), slope (10%), soil bearing (10%), environmental impact (5%), hydrology (8%), settlement area (11%) and linear engineering structure (7%). A basic for sub-criteria weighted within designed criteria was conducted according to cost and engineering properties.