Pathway routing between Hamedan and Markazi based on environmental geology using Remote Sensing and Geographical Information Systems

One of the most important steps in road construction is the initial route design step or the zero-phase study. Before road construction, there must be a comprehensive checkup for the region around the site to detect the most safest and economical route. Nowadays, it is obvious that not much paying attention to the environmental geology and the safety of the developmental plans will lead to the waste of land resources, environmental and economic disaster which is completely against sustainable development between related communities. In order to eliminate economic and environmental damages, the zero phase study of the region and gathering of information is necessary. The main purpose in this article is to present the optimal route of the environmental geology, engineering and economic from Kabudarahang County in Hamadan province to Saveh County in Markazi province. Therefore the optimal and smallest route between mentioned regions considering the geology (lithology, Layers geometric, faults and joints), rivers, topography, vegetation coverage, land use and protected areas has been designed. In the first of the achieving purpose, informational layers from different resources were gathered. Then, these vector layers converted to raster layers and after performing the geo-referencing step, the comparison of layers was possible. Therefore the weight function of each layer in comparison of each criterion was calculated to evaluate different information layers. Then Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was utilized to compare the results from different information layers. Results gathered from AHP in ArcGIS program shows that presented routing is more favorable in environmental geology and do less pass from regions covered by vegetation or even rivers and faults. In other hands, designed route will lead to time and design cost savings. All the mentioned parameters are ways to achieve the optimal route. In addition to benefits of designed route in environmental geology in spite of constructed route, results show that the designed route is shorter than the existing route. Also the cut/fill operation volume of the new route will lead to reduce the costs of constructions.