GIS-Based Decision Support System for Wind Farm Site Selection

Abstract

This paper aims to develop a GIS-based decision support system to satisfy the requirements of an effective site selection for wind farm. The proposed system determines the optimal site of wind farm in Tobruk city, Libya. This spatial model is carried out through a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. A geodatabase is designed to include data layers of wind speed information, elevation, slope, urban area, airports, major and minor roads, and important place. The development of the system is carried out using ArcGIS 10 with spatial analyst extension. ArcGIS provides its own application programming in the form of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to build the user interface. As a result, the system determines the optimum sites for the wind farm position.
Keywords—GIS-Based Decision Support System; Wind Farm; Multi Criteria Decision Making.