Assessing Site Selection of New Towns Using TOPSIS Method under Entropy Logic: A Case study: New Towns of Tehran Metropolitan Region (TMR)

Abstract

Location planning process as one of the most complicated spatial decisions is the initial and perhaps one of the critical steps in the development of a New Town. Site selection (seat and location) is a fundamental factor in success of new towns functionality, and also determines the success of the new town investment. Since location planning and selecting a well-fit option from the feasible alternatives is a significant problem in every decision making process, Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) has been found to be an efficient approach to solve this kind of problems. There are different MCDM models that have been applied for site selection projects in both urban and regional scales. But simultaneous application of quantitative and quantitative criteria and weighting (importance coefficient) of indicators according to regional features and theoretical principles, make TOPSIS as an optimal model to assess site selection projects. This method emphasizes that selected alternative should have the least distance with positive idea solution (the best possible site) and the most distance with negative ideal solution (the worst possible site). In this paper, using technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) we intended to evaluate site selection of New Towns of Tehran Metropolitan Region (TMR) to show their overall situation to optimal alternative (site selection).