A GIS-Based AHP Approach for Emergency Warehouse Site Selection: A Case Close to Turkey-Syria Border

Abstract

Although the term “disaster” includes natural events like earthquake, flood and drought, it also covers; the wars, intense migration waves, industrial accidents and even epidemic diseases. In recent years, the number and severity of both natural and man-made disasters has been increasing. In this context Gaziantep –the border city of Turkey to Syria- is facing many logistical problems because of the crisis in the region that has a broad repercussion in press. In addition, the corona virus pandemic increased the supply traffic in the region. The region is in need for many emergency warehouses to store the emergency supplies and send to the needy. Thus, a three step hybrid solution method is developed to solve this real life problem. The first stage is the determination of selection criteria; secondly the spatial database is created by using a Geographical Information System (GIS). Then, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique is applied to assign the importance levels to the selection criteria to generate the suitability map to choose the most appropriate emergency warehouse site selection in Gaziantep. Additionally, scenario analyses are conducted to understand the effects of importance levels on the problem results. As a result, 1.3% of the study area is determined as “quite suitable” for establishing an emergency warehouse.