The Groudwater Potential Assessment by the Use of AHP and Fuzzy Technuques (Case Study of Northern Basins of Ilam Province)

One of the important issues in water resources management is the identification of ground water behavior. The aim of this paper is the estimation and comparison of two methods for potential ground water, sites by the use of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and fuzzy logic. In order to achieve this objective 8 parameters including lithology, rivers, slpe changes, land use, topography, population, springs, wells, faults and fractures were used as information layer in the northern part of Ilam provicne with an area of 5218 km2. The final map obtained by AHP shows that high groundwater recarge potential exists in the limestone areas with high fractures. The evaluation of different overlap models, according to the level of compliance with the lithology indicates that fuzzy integrated method (algebraic sum) is mor appropriates than other methods in finding groundwater potential sites of reservoirs in the area. The method using 1000 km2 scope proves high potentials in the central parts of the map, which shows an acceptable consistence with the final map obtained by analytic hierarchy process while consistency of the related maps of springs and wells map in the region also confirm accuracy of these methods.