FINDING AND DESIGNING DAMS USING GIS AND MULTICRITERIA DECISION MAKING

Abstract

Design of the dam passes in several stages beginning by exploratory studies and ending Select design dimensional of the dam. The exploratory stage studies are considered of the most important stages of the design of the dam to ensure selection of the optimal location for the dam and necessary detailed requirements to begin design of parts Dam. Suitable site for dam is considered as a multi-faceted challenge. The main objective of this study is to develop a multi-criteria decision algorithm capable of selecting the optimum dam site and its main specifications when planning to design dams taking into consideration all available data in a short time and with high flexibility. The algorithm is composed of three stages of analysis. The first stage is to generate a suitability map for dam site inside the entire study area while the second stage getting the optimum site among the highly suitable sites found in the first stage. The third stage is design of the cross section of suggested dam.

To achieve this framework, a GIS-based MCDM tool for dam site selection is developed as a toolbar in ArcGIS9.3 environment. In this research, we suggested to build dams on Kneceh branch. The results show  that GIS-MCDM in dam site selection would simplify the definition of decision strategies and facilitate an exploratory analysis in short time and less effort.