ASSESSMENT OF WEIGHTED OVERLAY CONFIGURATION PARAMETERS TOWARDS ROUTE SELECTION IDENTIFICATION

Abstract

Finding the route with the lowest cumulative cost is one of the critical task in utilities management especially in power industries. Selection of the right route is a crucial aspect for identifying the most suitable and low cost path from floating solar photovoltaic system (FSPV) to proposed infrastructure facilities (IF) area that is important to reduce the travel time. The selection process involves several environmental parameters and criteria that play essential role for this route selection. Therefore, this study using ArcGIS Spatial Analyst that offer suitable processing tool that able to deals with raster data. In order to get the suitable path, weighted overlay tool being used to generate the cost surface that later used for computing the path distance and cost distance in the route selection processing. As the purpose of this study is to evaluate how the route selected based on different scenarios, different influence factor percentage and evaluation scale were set during weighted overlay processing environment. Land use type, geological type and slope degree are the three main input used to execute weighted overlay process along with the location of the infrastructure facilities and transmission main intake building. A comparative analysis from the results obtained showed that different influence factor percentage resulting to various least costly path line. However, changing the evaluation scale for the land use data giving discourage result as even the restricted value had been assigned to several land use type, the route selection did not avoid the restricted areas. To conclude from all the findings, No Data value should be assigned to the land use type to be excluded in the scale value instead of using restricted value in order to get the best route selected that avoid the restricted areas.