Solar desalination site selection on the Caspian Sea coast using AHP and fuzzy logic methods

Access to drinking water is a necessity in many developing countries. The most available water sources are saline or contain harmful bacteria, which are not drinkable. Desalination of saline water and choosing a suitable location for the desalination process are inevitable in most countries. GIS is a computer-based system used to generate, store, display, market, and process geographic information related to various features and phenomena. This research locates the most optimal points in the Caspian Sea coast to construct solar water desalination using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and fuzzy logic. In the primary section, important factors are identified in determining the appropriate location, and then, the effectiveness of each criterion is determined. In the next section, various maps are formed based on the nature of these factors using fuzzy membership functions (Gaussian, Large, and Linear). Criteria for locating water desalination facilities include slope, annual rainfall, distance to roads, distance to rivers, distance to faults, land use, elevation, and distance to the sea. In this research, site selection is obtained by AHP and fuzzy methods with a gamma value of 0.1–0.9. Finally, the correlation coefficient between the maps generated by AHP and the fuzzy method is then calculated. The highest correlation between AHP and fuzzy map is 0.24752 for the fuzzy map with 0.7 gamma.