Web application system for urban best location determination based on internet of things: Case study shopping mall site selection

Abstract

The urban commercial center has developed and become play an important role in the lives of individuals to provide for their material and moral needs, especially with modern methods of designing commercial centers. Shopping mall site selection is a critical issue for urban planners since it involves various requirements for a successful venture. In this study, optimal urban shopping mall location selection has been done out of multiple alternative locations in city of Baghdad Iraq by introducing a web application system that can find the best site from alternatives by using MEREC and modified TOPSIS algorithms. MEREC algorithm is utilized to obtain Criteria weights and modified TOPSIS for ranking the alternatives. Four criteria are considered with eight alternatives sites. The proposed system has two-part, hardware part (embedded systems) designed by utilizing NEO-6M GPS receiver with ESP8266NodeMCU to obtain coordinate of regions and then, using the HTTP protocol to communicate to submit these data to Thinkspeak IoT platform. The second part is the web application developed by PHP, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and MySQL used to allow the system admin to enter the locations of the alternatives with their criteria into the system to get the best urban shopping mall location. The results showed effectiveness of overall suggested system.