Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis Using Hierarchical Analysis (AHP) Method Based on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to Find the Optimal Location for Secondary Schools in Baghdad Governorate

Abstract

Educational institutions are considered among the important and necessary services provided by the state to its residents, and the balanced distribution of those services is considered as indicator towards ensuring equal educational opportunities. Baghdad Governorate were selected according to seven basic criteria that are based on the opinions of a group of experts and specialists and translated into digital form using what is known as the Saaty scale, to derive the relative priority vector to rank the criteria according to importance. The results were as follows: “The population’s actual need for schools (46.6%), nearness of the school to the main street (15.9%), nearness of the school to health centers (15.0%), the standard ratio of the number of students in each school (5.5%), the standard ratio of the number of teachers in each school (4.10%), the standard ratio of the number of teachers to the number of students (8.8%), the standard ratio of the number of students in each class (4.2%), and then transfer the data to Raster within the GIS program and the weights of the standards were entered to measure their impact on schools and classify them into four levels (extreme importance, great importance, important, less important), as the percentage of schools in each category respectively reached (26%, 16%, 6%, 2%) respectively, noting that the degree of importance represents the need to build new schools. The study recommends the need to fill the deficit experienced by the educational services provided within the study area by adopting the results that have been reached by building new schools, taking into account the selection of their sites as the basic criteria.