Selection of urban bypass highway alternatives involves the consideration of competing and conflicting criteria and factors, which\nrequire multicriteria decision analysis. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is one of the most commonly used multicriteria decision\nmaking (MCDM) methods that can integrate personal preferences in performing spatial analyses on the physical and nonphysical\nparameters. In this paper, the traditional AHP is modified to fuzzy AHP for the determination of the optimal bypass route for\nEldoret town inKenya.ThefuzzyAHPis proposed in order to take care of the vagueness type uncertainty encountered in alternative\nbypass location determination. In the implementation, both engineering and environmental factors comprising of physical and\nsocioeconomic objectives were considered at different levels of decision hierarchy.The results showed that the physical objectives\n(elevation, slope, soils, geology, and drainage networks) and socioeconomic objectives (land-use and road networks) contributed\nthe same weight of 0.5 towards the bypass location prioritization process. At the subcriteria evaluation level, land-use and existing\nroad networks contributed the highest significance of 47.3% amongst the seven decision factors. Integrated with GIS-based least\ncost path (LCP) analysis, the fuzzy AHP results produced themost desirable and optimal route alignment, as compared to the AHP\nonly prioritization approach.
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