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Landslides are a common type of natural disaster in mountainous areas. As a result of the comprehensive influences of geology, geomorphology and climatic conditions, the susceptibility to landslide hazards in mountainous areas shows obvious regionalism. The evaluation of regional landslide susceptibility can help reduce the risk to the lives of mountain residents. In this paper, the Shannon entropy theory, a fuzzy comprehensive method and an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) have been used to demonstrate a variable type of weighting for landslide susceptibility evaluation modeling, combining subjective and objective weights. Further, based on a single factor sensitivity analysis, we established a strict criterion for landslide susceptibility assessments. Eight influencing factors have been selected for the study of Zhen'an County, Shan'xi Province: the lithology, relief amplitude, slope, aspect, slope morphology, altitude, annual mean rainfall and distance to the river. In order to verify the advantages of the proposed method, the landslide index, prediction accuracy P, the R-index and the area under the curve were used in this paper. The results show that the proposed model of landslide hazard susceptibility can help to produce more objective and accurate landslide susceptibility maps, which not only take advantage of the information from the original data, but also reflect an expert's knowledge and the opinions of decision-makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a widely used used multi-criteria decision-making method (MCDM). This method is based on pairwise comparison, which forms the so-called Pairwise Comparison Matrix (PCM). PCMs usually contain some errors, which can have an influence on the eventual results. In order to avoid incorrect values of priorities, the inconsistency index (ICI) has been introduced in the AHP by Saaty. However, the user of the AHP can encounter many definitions of ICIs, of which values are usually different. Nevertheless, a lot of these indices are based on a similar idea. The values of some pairs of these indices are characterized by high values of a correlation coefficient. In my work, I present some results of Monte Carlo simulation, which allow us to observe the dependencies in AHP. I select some pairs of ICIs and I evaluate values of the Pearson correlation coefficient for them. The results are compared with some scatter plots that show the type of dependencies between selected ICIs. The presented research shows some pairs of indices are closely correlated so that they can be used interchangeably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, coal-fired power plants contribute the biggest part of power generation in China. Challenges of energy conservation and emission reduction of the coal-fired power plant encountering with a rapid growth due to the rising proportion of renewable energy generation in total power generation. Energy saving power generation dispatch (ESPGD) based on power units sorting technology is a promising approach to meet the challenge. Therefore, it is crucial to establish a reasonable and feasible multi-index comprehensive evaluation (MICE) framework for assessing the performance of coal-fired power units accessed by the power grid. In this paper, a hierarchical multiple criteria evaluation system was established. Except for the typical economic and environmental indices, the evaluation system considering operational flexibility and power quality indices either. A hybrid comprehensive evaluation model was proposed to assess the unit operational performance. The model is an integration of grey relational analysis (GRA) with analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and a novel entropy-based method (abbreviate as BECC) which integrates bootstrap method and correlation coefficient (CC) into entropy principle to get the objective weight of indices. Then a case study on seven typical 600 megawatts coal-fired power units was carried out to illustrate the proposed evaluation model, and a weight sensitivity analysis was developed in addition. The results of the case study shows that unit 4 has the power generating priority over the rest ones, and unit 2 ranks last, with the lowest grey relational degree. The weight sensitivity analysis shows that the environmental factor has the biggest sensitivity coefficient. And the validation analysis of the developed BECC weight method shows that it is feasible for the MICE model, and it is stable with an ignorable uncertainty caused by the stochastic factor in the bootstrapping process. The elaborate analysis of the result reveals that it is feasible to rank power units with the proposed evaluation model. Furthermore, it is beneficial to synthesize the updated multiple criteria in optimizing the power generating priority of coal-fired power units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are numerous priority deriving methods (PDMs) for pairwise-comparison-based (PCB) problems. They are often examined within the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which applies the Principal Right Eigenvalue Method (PREV) in the process of prioritizing alternatives. It is known that when decision makers (DMs) are consistent with their preferences when making evaluations concerning various decision options, all available PDMs result in the same priority vector (PV). However, when the evaluations of DMs are inconsistent and their preferences concerning alternative solutions to a particular problem are not transitive (cardinally), the outcomes are often different. This research study examines selected PDMs in relation to their ranking credibility, which is assessed by relevant statistical measures. These measures determine the approximation quality of the selected PDMs. The examined estimates refer to the inconsistency of various Pairwise Comparison Matrices (PCMs)—i.e., W = (wij), wij > 0, where i, j = 1,..., n—which are obtained during the pairwise comparison simulation process examined with the application of Wolfram's Mathematica Software. Thus, theoretical considerations are accompanied by Monte Carlo simulations that apply various scenarios for the PCM perturbation process and are designed for hypothetical three-level AHP frameworks. The examination results show the similarities and discrepancies among the examined PDMs from the perspective of their quality, which enriches the state of knowledge about the examined PCB prioritization methodology and provides further prospective opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landslides are one of the most frequent geomorphic hazards, and they often result in the loss of property and human life in the Changbai Mountain area (CMA), Northeast China. The objective of this study was to produce and compare landslide susceptibility maps for the CMA using an information content model (ICM) with three knowledge-driven methods (the artificial hierarchy process with the ICM (AHP-ICM), the entropy weight method with the ICM (EWM-ICM), and the rough set with the ICM (RS-ICM)) and to explore the influence of different knowledge-driven methods for a series of parameters on the accuracy of landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM). In this research, the landslide inventory data (145 landslides) were randomly divided into a training dataset: 70% (81 landslides) were used for training the models and 30% (35 landslides) were used for validation. In addition, 13 layers of landslide conditioning factors, namely, altitude, slope gradient, slope aspect, lithology, distance to faults, distance to roads, distance to rivers, annual precipitation, land type, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), topographic wetness index (TWI), plan curvature, and profile curvature, were taken as independent, causal predictors. Landslide susceptibility maps were developed using the ICM, RS-ICM, AHP-ICM, and EWM-ICM, in which weights were assigned to every conditioning factor. The resultant susceptibility was validated using the area under the ROC curve (AUC) method. The success accuracies of the landslide susceptibility maps produced by the ICM, RS-ICM, AHP-ICM, and EWM-ICM methods were 0.931, 0.939, 0.912, and 0.883, respectively, with prediction accuracy rates of 0.926, 0.927, 0.917, and 0.878 for the ICM, RS-ICM, AHP-ICM, and EWM-ICM, respectively. Hence, it can be concluded that the four models used in this study gave close results, with the RS-ICM exhibiting the best performance in landslide susceptibility mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]