Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Sustainable Cities and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/scs Multi- criteria decision analysis FANP based on GIS for siting municipal solid waste incineration power plant in the north of Iran Sadaf Feyzi a,b , Mehrdad Khanmohammadi b , Niloofar Abedinzadeh a, ⁎ , Mehdi Aalipour c a Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research (ACECR), Environmental Research Institute, Rasht, Iran b Department of Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Natural Resources, University of Guilan, Iran c Environmental Assessment and Spatial Planning, Faculty of Natural Resources, University of Tehran, Iran ARTICLEINFO Keywords: Municipal solid waste incineration Site selection Fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) DEMATEL techniquee Rasht ABSTRACT Site selecting for installing municipal solid waste incineration power plant with sustainable development per- spectives is a multi-criteria decision. Identifying the factors that afect it will lead to more advantages including reducing costs and eliminating community dissatisfaction. In this research, in order to provide the most optimal model, the criteria for installing MSWI power plant were developed in the form of three main environmental, economic, and socio-cultural criteria. First, the decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) technique has been applied to identify the interrelations between factors. Then, they were ranked by importance by fuzzy analytic network process (FANP). Based on the results, the highest and least signifcance have been assigned to the main economic, socio-cultural criteria, and sub-criteria of land use and railway respectively. Finally, a case study was conducted in Rasht County in order to evaluate the efciency of the obtained model. Using geographic information system, GIS, we applied the fnal weights to the layers of each of the sub-criteria and overlay them. The results of the output map indicated the capability of the obtained model based on FANP and GIS to select the proper place for installing MSWI power plant and its application in other similar studies. 1. Introduction Municipal solid waste is considered one of the important issues that threaten the quality of the environment in urban and rural areas of developing countries. This is mainly due to the increase of the amount of solid waste generated by increasing population, rapid urbanization and changes in consumption patterns (Hoornweg & Bhada-Tata, 2012; Khoshand, Kamalan, & Rezaei, 2018). In recent decades, the waste management processes used in many European, Asian, and American countries have shifted from landflling to incineration (Lino & Ismail, 2017b; Rezaei, Ghobadian, Samadi, & Karimi, 2018). Following waste disposal problems and environmental issues asso- ciated with them, the solid waste incineration process to reduce the volume and weight of the waste and the generation of energy from waste have been considered much (Nabavi-Pelesaraei, Bayat, Hosseinzadeh-Bandbafha, Afrasyabi, & Chau, 2017). One of the essen- tial steps for the establishment of waste incineration power plant is to select the appropriate site taking into account social, economic, en- vironmental, and technical criteria (Wu, Wang et al., 2018). These criteria vary from country to country or even from region to region in the same country (Aragonés-Beltrán, Pastor-Ferrando, García-García, & Pascual-Agulló, 2010). Project planners recycling energy from waste often need to weigh these criteria and accordingly rank them under review sites (Kazimieras Zavadskas, Baušys, & Lazauskas, 2015). By using existing data and appropriate designing of construction and op- eration phases, the problems caused by the waste incineration process can be signifcantly reduced and sites with a minimum risk for public health and the environment are identifed (Aragonés-Beltrán et al., 2010). The criteria that should be considered in selecting a facility unit vary for each state and local community and it is specifc for that community (Tchobanoglous & Kreith, 2002). All researches in the feld of solid waste incineration site selection show that Decision-making criteria in diferent countries pursue common goals such as environ- mental, economic, and social desirability (Panepinto & Zanetti, 2018). Solid waste management is inherently a complicated issue due to the large number of criteria in decision-making. Diferent authors have used diferent criteria according to their particular case study. For ex- ample, in a study by Abedi-Varaki and Davtalab (2016), natural criteria (geology, distance from farms and forests, distance from rivers, depth of water areas, distance from faults, slope, distance from villages) and https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2019.101513 Received 28 October 2018; Received in revised form 20 March 2019; Accepted 20 March 2019 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: sadaf_feyzi@yahoo.com (S. Feyzi), mkhanmohamadi@yahoo.com (M. Khanmohammadi), n.abedinzadeh@gmail.com (N. Abedinzadeh), maalipour@ut.ac.ir (M. Aalipour). Sustainable Cities and Society 47 (2019) 101513 Available online 22 March 2019 2210-6707/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T