SUITABILITY ASSESSMENT IN INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT PROJECTS: A CASE STUDY IN YUCATÁN, MEXICO

Abstract

This article presents an approach to land suitability assessment (LSA) that accounts for the opposing interests and viewpoints of multiple stakeholders. LSA is a widely used geospatial technique for locating optimal sites for infrastructure investment. The approach described in this paper uses the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to elicit relative importance weights of a set of geographical attributes, the evaluation of the state of each attribute in spatial units using value functions on a geographic information system (GIS), and the implementation of the Ordered Weighted Average (OWA) as an aggregation operator. The approach is illustrated through the location of potential sites for swine plant investments, taking into consideration environmental conflicts in Yucatán, Mexico. This approach provides a systematic and transparent procedure for analyzing infrastructure projects’ land suitability and developing investment recommendations that promote sustainable development.