Hybrid Methods for Optimisation of Weights in Spatial Multi-Criteria Evaluation Decision for Fire Risk and Hazard

The challenge for everyone involved in preserving the ecosystem is to find creative ways to protect and restore the remaining ecosystems while accommodating and enhancing the country social and economic well-being. Frequent fires of anthropogenic origin have been affecting the ecosystems in many countries adversely. Hence adopting ways of decision making such as Multicriteria Decision Making (MCDM) is appropriate since it will enhance the evaluation and analysis of fire risk and hazard of the ecosystem. In this paper, fire risk and hazard data from the West Gonja area of Ghana were used in some of the methods (Analytical Hierarchy Process, Compromise Programming, and Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) for MCDM evaluation and analysis to determine the optimal weight method for fire risk and hazard. Ranking of the land cover types was carried out using; Fire Hazard, Fire Fighting Capacity and Response Risk Criteria. Pairwise comparison under Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to determine the weight of the various criteria. Weights for sub-criteria were also obtained by the pairwise comparison method. The results were optimised using GRA and Compromise Programming (CP). The results from each method, hybrid GRA and CP, were compared and it was established that all methods were satisfactory in terms of optimisation of weight. The most optimal method for spatial multicriteria evaluation was the hybrid GRA method. Thus, a hybrid AHP and GRA method is more effective method for ranking alternatives in MCDM than the hybrid AHP and CP method.