Waste Management 26 (2006) 299–306

www.elsevier.com/locate/wasman

Municipal solid waste landfill siting using intelligent system

Omar Al-Jarrah a, Hani Abu-Qdais b,*
a
Department of Computer Engineering, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid 22110, Jordan
b
Department of Civil Engineering, Jordan University of Science and Technology, P.O. Box 3030, Irbid 22110, Jordan
Accepted 26 January 2005
Available online 12 July 2005

Abstract

Historically, landfills have been the dominant alternative for the ultimate disposal of municipal solid waste. This paper addresses the
problem of siting a new landfill using an intelligent system based on fuzzy inference. The proposed system can accommodate new
information on the landfill site selection by updating its knowledge base. Several factors are considered in the siting process includ-ing
topography and geology, natural resources, socio-cultural aspects, and economy and safety. The system will rank sites on a scale of 0–
100%, with 100% being the most appropriate one. A weighting system is used for all of the considered factors. The results from testing the
system using different sites show the effectiveness of the system in the selection process.
2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction The contamination of groundwater by landfill leachate

Landfilling has been used for many years as the most
common method for the disposal of solid waste generated
by different communities (Komilis et al., 1999). Despite
the intensive efforts that are directed to the recycling and
recovery of solid wastes, landfills remain and will re-main
an integral part of most solid waste management plans.
Solid waste disposed in a landfill usually is sub-jected to a
series of complex biochemical and physical processes,
which lead to the production of both liquid and gaseous
emissions. As water percolates through the solid waste
matrix, leachate is produced which contains soluble
components and degradation products from the refuse.
Greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide are
generated during the stabilization of the or-ganic fraction
of solid waste. Volatile components of the solid waste tend
to be emitted into the atmosphere with the landfill gases.
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +962 2 7201000; fax: +962 2 7095018.
E-mail addresses: aljarrah@just.edu.jo (O. Al-Jarrah), hqdais@
just.edu.jo (H. Abu-Qdais).
has been reported by several researchers (Nixon et al.,
1997; Scultz and Kjeldsen, 1986; Sawney and Kozoloski,
1984). Lee and Jones (1994) reported the potential adverse
impacts of municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills on those
who own or use properties near such facilities. Hirsshfeld
et al. (1992) reported that the property values near MSW
landfills are adversely impacted by the landfill for dis-
tances of a mile or more from the area where waste depo-
sition occurs. Adverse environmental impacts, public
health and socio-economic issues associated with MSW
landfills have led to the issuance of stricter regulations and
increased public opposition to the siting of such facil-ities
(not in my back yard syndrome) (Ham, 1993). As a result,
the siting of a new landfill has become one of the most
difficult tasks faced by communities involved in MSW
management (Tchobanoglous et al., 1993).
Siting a sanitary landfill requires an extensive evalua-
tion process in order to identify the best available disposal
location. This location must comply with the require-ments
of governmental regulations and at the same time must
minimize economic, environmental, health, and so-cial
costs (Siddiqui et al., 1996). The site selection proce-dure,
however, should make maximum use of the

0956-053X/$ - see front matter 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.wasman.2005.01.026
300 O. Al-Jarrah, H. Abu-Qdais / Waste Management 26 (2006) 299–306
available information and ensure that the outcome of the
process is acceptable by most stakeholders. Therefore,
landfill siting generally requires processing a variety of
spatial data. Processing the data by conventional methods
using drawing and calculation tools is generally time and
resources consuming. The utilization of artificial intelli-
gence technology, such as expert systems, will help in solid
waste planning and management, particularly in the land-
fill siting process (Thomas et al., 1990).
Ramuu and Kennedy (1994) presented a heuristic
algorithm for locating a solid waste disposal site. They
indicated that there are a number of criteria that can be
used to determine the suitability of a potential disposal site.
In order to minimize the transportation cost, the ap-proach
proposed by Ramuu and Kennedy allowed that the landfill
could be located along any road linkage. Although
transportation cost is an important consider-ation, other
factors such as the aesthetics of the solid waste disposal
site also should be taken into account.
Kao and Lin (1996) proposed a siting model that was
explored for use with raster-based GIS. A mixed integer-
programming model was developed to obtain a landfill site
with optimal compactness of the site, which refers to the
ratio of perimeter to site area.
Siddiqui et al. (1996) used GIS and the analytical
hierarchy process (AHP) decision-making procedure to aid
in preliminary site selection. The GIS was used to
manipulate and present spatial data, while the AHP was
used to rank potential landfill areas based on a wide variety
of criteria, such as hydro-geology, land use and proximity
from urban centers.
Valentine (1997) presented a system of a multiple-as-
pect alternative evaluation for the selection of a landfill in
the Urbino region in Italy. The system consists of a matrix
that provides environmental categories and im-pact
indicators. He stressed the importance of objective
methodologies to help in making the best decision in the
selection of landfill sites.
Charnpratheep et al. (1997) explored the prospect of
coupling fuzzy set theory with GIS for the preliminary
screening of landfill sites in Thailand. Proximity of geo-
graphic objects, slope and elevation were the criteria used
for the investigation. However, the authors recom-mended
carrying out further studies involving other landfill
selection criteria for preliminary screening, such as socio-
economic and hydro-geologic criteria. Gupta et al. (2003)
utilized fuzzy logic, which took into account the
uncertainty during the process of the environmental
impacts assessment of landfill siting and considered the
frequency of impacts occurrence.
It is very difficult to come up with a selection criterion
that can precisely describe the preference of one site over
another, because most of the selection parameters can-not
be given precisely such as land slope, depth to ground
water from landfill base, distance to surface water bodies,
distance to residential area, and distance
from highway. For example, the distance from highway
can range from few meters to kilometers and the land slope
can vary across the site from flat to steep. This makes
fuzzy logic a more natural approach to this prob-lem
(Charnpratheep et al., 1997). Fuzzy logic was intro-duced
by (Zadeh, 1965) to describe and to deal with such
uncertainties. In this paper, the power of fuzzy logic and
fuzzy inference systems were utilized for preliminary
landfill site selection. All of the selection factors are rep-
resented by linguistic variables. The selection criteria are
weighted to represent the importance and contribution of
each factor.
The proposed system encodes the expertise of the envi-
ronmentalists in a fuzzy inference system that produces the
degree of preference of the selected site. It can be eas-ily
used by MSW planners to help in the initial selection
process of landfill site. The system is flexible and can be
adapted for new information on the landfill site that may be
incorporated into the knowledge base. This will allow for
interaction of the user with the computer to help in better
understanding the landfill siting process. Several factors
were considered in the siting process. These factors cover
topography and geology, natural re-sources, socio-cultural
aspects, and economy and safety.
The present paper is organized as follows. The fol-
lowing section describes the landfill selection factors.
Section 3 presents an overview of fuzzy sets and fuzzy
logic. The fuzzy inference system is presented in section 4,
while Section 5 is devoted for presenting and discuss-ing
the simulation results. Finally, the paper is con-cluded in
Section 6.
2. Landfill siting factors
In assessing a site as a possible location for solid waste
landfilling, many factors could be considered (Sa-vage et
al., 1998). To achieve a successful siting pro-cess, several
significant environmental and political obstacles have to be
overcome. As a result, convincing the decision-makers and
gaining public acceptance for the proposed landfill site are
prerequisites for a success-ful siting process. There are
several factors that should be considered when selecting a
landfill site. These fac-tors may be presented in many
ways;, however, the most useful way is the one that may be
easily under-stood by the community (Tchobanoglous et
al., 1993). The following factors are usually considered in
the landfill siting process:
Land slope.
Soil characteristics.
Depth to groundwater.
Surface water.
Environmentally rare or endangered species breeding
areas.
 O. Al-Jarrah, H. Abu-Qdais / Waste Management 26 (2006) 299–306
Distance to residential, religious and archeological
sites.
Land use.
Major infrastructure systems (e.g., electrical trans-
mission lines, gas, water or sewer pipelines).
Seismic activity.
Land cost.
Distance from highway.
Distance from waste generation source.
Site capacity.
Distance from airport runway.
In addition to the previously mentioned factors, other
factors may be considered based on local condi-tions and
circumstances. In this study, the factors used for the
analysis of landfill site suitability were grouped into four
main categories, including topography and geology, natural
resources, socio-cultural, and economy and safety.
Topography and geology factors include land slope (LS)
and soil hydraulic conductivity (SHC). Depth to the ground
water from landfill base (DGW) and distance to surface
water bodies (DSW) comprise the natural resources group.
The socio-cultural effects are measured using the distance
to Residential, Reli-gious and Archeological sites (DRRA).
Four parame-ters are used to characterize the economy and
safety, which are land cost (LC) as a percentage of the
highest price, distance from highway (DH), distance from
waste generation source (DWGS) measured by the driving
time, and distance from airport runway (DAR).
The impact severity of each parameter was deter-mined
as high, moderate, low, and nil. Among the many aspects
to be considered in the site selection, it is impor-tant to
consider most of them and with objective weight-ing. The
degrees of suitability for a specific factor may be different.
A scoring system is commonly used to ex-press this
variability. In the present study, these factors were given
weights based on a scoring system ranging from 0 to 1.
These weights were given judgmentally based on a
consensus of those professionals with exper-tise in sanitary
landfill siting and on data from the tech-nical literature.
3. Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic
Uncertainty is a major concept in our daily life. Fuzzy
sets and fuzzy logic provide an approach to deal with this
concept. In recent years, fuzzy logic has been successfully
applied in a variety of disciplines including computer
vision, weather prediction, image processing, nuclear
reactor control, control of biomedical processes, automatic
tuning and many other fields of research (Ya-ger and
Zadeh, 1993; Gzogala and Rawlik, 1989; Al-Jar-rah and
AL-Rousan, 2001; Al-Jarrah and Halawani, 2001; Al-
Jarrah and Bani-Melhem, 2001).
301
Fuzzy sets are sets with imprecise boundaries. A fuzzy
set provides a mechanism to express the degree of mem-
bership rather than accepting or denying the membership.
The wide use and popularity of fuzzy set is related to its
ability to tolerate imprecise and linguistic data. It assigns
each element in the universe of discourse a value repre-
senting its grade of membership in the fuzzy set. This
number represents the certainty or belief this individual is
compatible with the concept represented by the fuzzy set.
A membership function (MF) is a curve that maps each
element in the input space into a membership value called
the degree of membership. The only restriction on the MF
is that it must vary between 0 and 1. The function itself
may take any shape that is defined and specified by the de-
signer to suit the nature of the problem from the point of
view of simplicity, convenience, speed and efficiency.
One of the most common classes of MFs is the trian-
gular MF. A triangular MF can be specified by three
parameters {a, b, c}. It is expressed as
8 0; x 6 a; c 6 x;
lx > x a ; a 6 x 6 b; 1Þ
ðÞ¼< b a ð
: b 6 x 6 c;
> c b;
c x
where (a < b < c) are the X coordinates of the three cor-
ners of the underlying MF.
Fuzzy sets representation conforms to the objectives
appearing in our daily linguistic usage such as ‘‘small’’,
‘‘medium’’ or ‘‘large’’. These expressions are called lin-
guistic values and the universe of discourse on which these
values are defined on is called a linguistic variable. The
basic operations on a classical set are union, inter-section
and complement. Corresponding to those basic operations,
Zadeh defined similar operations on fuzzy sets (Zadeh,
1965).
Fuzzy IF–THEN rules form the rule base in a fuzzy
inference system and they provide a means to encode
conditional propositions. A single IF–THEN rule takes the
form
IF the road is narrow and the rain is heavy THEN . . .
All parts of the antecedent are evaluated simulta-
neously and resolved to a single number using the logi-cal
operators (AND, OR, NOT).
Fuzzy reasoning, known also as approximate reason-
ing, is the process of deriving conclusions from a set of IF–
THEN fuzzy rules using an inference procedure. By fuzzy
reasoning, the truth of the consequent is inferred from the
degree of truth of the antecedent.
The concept of fuzzy set theory, IF–THEN rules, and
fuzzy reasoning together constitute a computing frame-
work usually called fuzzy inference system (FIS). The
structure of a fuzzy inference system consists of three
major parts: a rule base that holds the fuzzy IF–THEN
rules used in the inference process, a database that
302 O. Al-Jarrah, H. Abu-Qdais / Waste Management 26 (2006) 299–306

contains the membership functions that characterize the
fuzzy sets, and a reasoning mechanism that performs the
inference procedure and derives conclusions depending on
a set of rules and facts. The fuzzy inference process
consists of five steps including fuzzification, application of
the fuzzy operators, fuzzy implication, fuzzy aggrega-tion,
and defuzzification. The last step uses a defuzzifica-tion
method to produce a single crisp number for each output
variable (Ros, 1995).
There are three widely used types of fuzzy inference
systems: Mamdani, Sugeno, and Tsukamoto (Mamdani and
Assilian, 1975; Takagi and Sugeno, 1985; Tsukam-oto,
1979). The basic difference between various models lies in
the representation of the consequents of their fuz-zy rules.
Accordingly, the aggregation and defuzzifica-tion
procedures of the three models are different. In this paper,
the Mamdani model will be utilized in devel-oping the
system, as this is the most suitable model when encoding
experts opinion in which their consequences are expressed
as linguistic variables, which is the case in this paper.
The Mamdani model was proposed by Mamdani in
1975 to control a steam engine and boiler combination. It
was among the very first control systems built based on the
theory of fuzzy logic (Mamdani and Assilian, 1975). This
model is characterized by representing the consequents of
its rules using fuzzy sets. The aggrega-tion of the outputs
of all rules yields a single fuzzy set (output). A
defuzzification process is then performed to extract a crisp
value from the output fuzzy set. For example, using the
centroid defuzzification method (Ros, 1995), the crisp
output of the Mamdani fuzzy inference system is given by
R
Def Y lB0 ðyÞy dy
R .
y¼ Y lB0 ðyÞ dy ð2Þ
4. Landfill site selection using fuzzy inference
The proposed system utilizes the power of fuzzy sets in
describing uncertainties in the different factors

W0
LS
SHS W1
DGW
W
DSW 2 Fuzzy Degree of
Fuzzy Defuz.
DRRA Aggregation Suitability
LC Implication W3
DH
W
DWG 4

S
DAR

Fuzzy
Rule Base

Fig. 1. Landfill site selection using fuzzy inference system.

1 Z S M L 1 Z S M L


0.5 0.5

0 0
-14 -10 -5 0 0 20 40 60 80 100
(a) SHC (m/s) (b) LS (%)

Fig. 2. Membership functions on SHC and LS.

 O. Al-Jarrah, H. Abu-Qdais / Waste Management 26 (2006) 299–306 303

1 Z S M L 1Z S M L


0.5 0.5

0 0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 0 50 100 150 DGW (m)
(a) DSW (m) (b)

Fig. 3. Membership functions on DSW and DGW.

1 Z S M L 1 Z S M L


0.5 0.5

00 20 40 60 80 100 0 0 1000 2000 3000 4000

(a) LC (%) (b) DRRA (m)

Fig. 4. Membership functions on LC and DRRA.

1 Z S M L 1 Z S M L


0.5 0.5

0 0
0 5 10 15 0 10 20 30 40 50 60
(a) DH (Km) (b) DWGS (min)

Fig. 5. Membership functions on DH and DWGS.

involved in landfill siting. Each factor is represented by a
linguistic variable defined over a universe of dis-course
that represents all permissible values. The expertise of an
environmentalist is coded into a fuzzy rule base, which
drives the inference system as shown in Fig. 1.
The contribution and severity of the various factors in
the site selection may be different. A scoring system is
commonly used to express this variability. The degree
of suitability of a site is expressed as a weighted sum of all
factors. These weights are given judgmentally based on a
consensus of those professionals with expertise in sanitary
landfill siting and on data from the technical literature. The
natural resources are given the highest impact (27%),
topography and geology (25%), and so-cio-cultural effects
(18%). The impact for economy and safety was chosen
such that the land cost is given (14%) and the others
parameters (16%).
304 O. Al-Jarrah, H. Abu-Qdais / Waste Management 26 (2006) 299–306

If DRRA is Z. then DS is D (0.18)

.
F D C B A .
1 If DRRA is L then DS is A (0.18)

If LC is Z then DS is A (0.14)
.
.
.


0.5 If LC is L then DS is D (0.14)

If DH is Z and DWGS is Z and DAR is Z then DS is B

0 .
0 20 40 60 80
DS (%)
Fig. 6. Linguistic variables for the degree of landfill site suitability.
Four linguistic values are defined on each linguistic
variable, which are zero (Z), small (S), medium (M), and
large (L) as shown in Figs. 2–5. The Mamdani mod-el is
used in our system as shown in Fig. 1. Five linguistic
values are used on the degree of suitability (DS) as shown
in Fig. 6. These values represent the following grades A, B,
C, D, and F. The rule base consists of 104 rules that
describe the various contributions of these factors on the
degree of suitability. According to the scoring system, we
defined five groups of fuzzy rules as follows:
(0.16) .
.
100
If DH is L and DWGS is L and DAR is L then DS is C
(0.16)
The number between the parentheses represents the
weight on the rule. The weight is used in the implica-tion
phase to reshape the membership function obtained after
the application of an implication operator. In this paper, we
have used the minimum operator as the implication method
and the maximum operator for aggregating the outputs
fuzzy sets. The final grade is given after defuzzification of
the aggre-gated outputs using the centroid method as
described in Eq. (2).

5. Experimental results
If LS is Z and SHC .is Z then DS is A (0.25)
.
. Several experiments were conducted to investigate the
If LS is L and SHC is L then DS is F (0.25) performance of the system. In our experiments, we asked
an expert to analyze different sites for suitability for
possible landfill siting. The relevant information rep-
If DGW is Z and DSW. is Z then DS is F (0.27) resenting the various factors was provided. The recom-
.
. mendation of the expert is then compared with the grade
If DGW is L and DSW is L then DS is A (0.27) given by our system.

Table 1
Landfill siting grades for different sites
Factor Site I Site II Site III Site IV
Topography and geology
Land slope (%) 7.0 11.0 50.0 25.0

Soil hydraulic conductivity (m/s) 10 12 10 6 10 3 10 10

Natural resources
Depth to ground water from landfill base (m) 120 50 8 100
Distance to surface water bodies (m) 1200 800 180 80
Socio-cultural
Distance to residential, religious and archeological sites (m) 3200 2000 450 1000
Economy and safety
Land cost (% of the highest price) 7.0 15.0 60.0 30.0
Distance from highway (km) 1.5 3.0 12.0 5.0
Distance from waste generation source (driving time) (min) 5.0 15.0 35.0 20.0
Distance from airport runway (km) 7.0 4.0 1.0 1.0
Grade (%) 91.19 53.00 23.33 52.09
 O. Al-Jarrah, H. Abu-Qdais / Waste Management 26 (2006) 299–306
Fig. 7. Location of Al Ghabawi landfill site with respect to the capital city Amman.
In the first experiment, the ability of the system in
grading an excellent site was tested. Table 1 shows the
parameters used for this site (Site I) in the experiment and
the corresponding grade. The grade given by the system,
which was 91.19%, is consistent with the expert opinion. A
lower quality site was selected in the second experiment
(Site II). The system gave this site a 53% grade, which was
also acceptable in terms of the param-eters of this site as
shown in Table 1. The third site (Site
III) was selected with a very low quality as indicated in
Table 1. The grade given by the system was 23.33%, which
clearly indicates that this site is an unacceptable choice. In
the last experiment, a site (Site IV) with a mixed set of
parameters in term of acceptance was se-lected as shown in
Table 1. The system graded this site with 52.09%. The last
experiment clearly shows the util-ity of the system when
presented with conflicting param-
eters. The result for this site is consistent with the expert s
preference. To test the ability of the system in grading
existing landfill sites, a test was carried out to grade the
newly operated Al Ghabawi landfill site in Amman Jordan
(Fig. 7). The site factors were used as in-put to run the
system. The grade given to the site was 81%, which
indicates that the system is capable of grad-ing sites during
the operational phase.
6. Conclusions
An important element of the landfill siting process is a
technique for evaluating the basic suitability of all
available land for sanitary landfill as an aid in selection
305
of a limited number of sites for more detailed evalua-tion.
The technique should establish criteria to illustrate the
relative suitability of land for sanitary landfilling. In
addition, the technique should be practical, taking into
account the resources available and should explain clearly
and directly the analysis and results in an easily
understandable format.
In this paper, an intelligent system approach for select-
ing a solid waste landfill site was utilized. The system uses
a fuzzy inference system that can encode the expertise of
an environmentalist and it can adapt by adjusting the
knowledge base. Several factors that affect the siting pro-
cess were considered including topography and geology,
natural resources, socio-cultural aspects, and economy and
safety. A scoring system was utilized to represent the
severity of these factors. The proposed system ranks sites
using a scale that ranges from 0% to 100%, with 100%
representing the optimal choice. Experimental re-sults
reveal the effectiveness of the system in terms of its
ranking capabilities. The proposed system can be used as a
tool by planners and decision makers in the process of
initial screening to select a suitable landfill site.
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