Risk-based multi-criteria decision analysis of gas power plants placement in semi-arid regions

The purpose of this research is to determine the optimum location to construct gas power plants (GPPs) in semi-arid regions. A combination of ordered weight averaging (OWA) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method named OWA-AHP is utilized to prepare land suitability maps with different risk scenarios when fuzzy method is to homogenize inputs. In the proposed method, AHP is to weigh each different parameter while OWA considers risk levels. In order to validate the accuracy of the proposed method, the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve is investigated. Besides, the self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm and Pearson correlation are used to determine the most important parameters for constructing GPP. According to obtained results, the areas located in the north and parts of the east and south of the selected case study (about 15%) at all risk levels are the optimum areas to be hosted for GPPs. Furthermore, ROC curve shows that the Area Under the Curve (AUC) values are high for both AHP and OWA-AHP methods (AUC Fuzzy-AHP = 94.0%, AUC OWA = 89.0%). The results of the SOM algorithm and Pearson correlation with high accuracy (RModel1: 0.853 and RModel2: 0.940) also depict that distance to the pipeline and road are the most important parameters to identify suitable locations for GPP.