Evaluating and Prioritizing Flight Obstacles for Airports Development using TOPSIS in GIS (Case Study:Birjand Airport)

Nowadays, the rate of urban population growth and urban communications can improve the essentiality of developing airport structures as an important transportation issues. The process of airport development as a complex structure is a time consuming and costly task. Several parameters such as social and economic elements, operational specifications, technical features and security issues have different effects on the performance of this phenomenon. The assessment and identification of flight barriers locations can be considered as one of the most important technical factors in the process issues of airport development. So, accurate methods are required in order to improve operations under the technical development process. In this paper, according to national and international parameters and standards, the criteria of airport development have been declared and prioritized for the future plan of the airport runways. For this purpose, at first, the real condition of each bands in terms of: topography, vegetation, hydrology, wind direction, proximity to urban areas, lighting systems, slope, length of runway and associated spatial layers, are checked in Birjand airport and entered into the GIS environment. The output GIS ready layers are aggregated in a meaningful context by prioritizing bands. After that, TOPSIS multi criteria decision making model is performed in 6 steps. Finally, considering numerical results, a reasonable set of runway directions is defined for the future planning and decision making on the airport. Comparing results of seven runways in Birjand airport indicates that No. 28 (runway) by the rank of 0.66 is the best and No. 08 by the value of 0.24 is the worst alternatives for the future policy of airport decision makers. Also, the east direction is the most appropriate and the south-west direction is the worst options for developing airport bands in the future development of Birjand airport.