Multicriteria decision makingand GIS for railroad planningin Kyrgyzstan

Abstract: The location of rail station and route planning for new railways in a country constitutecomplicated planning processes which involve the consideration and analysis of various datasets. It includes the evaluation of socio-economic and technical parameters to minimizeenvironmental impacts of different alternatives and to achieve the development of alternativestation and corridors for the planned rail networks link. In Kyrgyzstan, these tasks areimplemented using traditional manual routines that the choice of a location rail station andselection of corridor for new railways are based on the topography of the land.The use of modern technological tools like Geographic Information System (GIS) forsuitable location of rail stations and selection of optimum routes involves managing a varietyof data sets from different sources and at different scales. This work is intended to investigateand show the capabilities of GIS in railroad planning and station location processes using partof the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway in the south of Kyrgyzstan as a case study.The study will identify the information needs of different factors and evaluationcriteria for locating station and railroad planning. To achieve these objectives spatialmulticriteria decision making (MCDM) processes for planning the rail station and the routeswere designed and developed using GIS.The relative importance of the parameters in rail station location and rail routeselection has been determined in cooperation with rail experts. The obtained scores were usedin pairwise comparison to determine the weight of factors/criteria maps related to theseparameters. These weighted factors/criteria maps were overlaid and suitability maps werecreated in GIS for rail station location and rail route selection. The Weighted linearcombination (WLC) and The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) were used to derive thesesuitability maps.