Metro Route Site Selection for Madurai City Using Remote Sensing and GIS

This study mainly deals with the selection of optimal locations for metro network and stations in Madurai city as a solution to meet the present and future transportation demands. Remote Sensing, Geographic Information System and AHP have been used for the purpose of extracting data, pre-processing, prioritizing and analyzing the data spatially. For the site selection process, criteria like population density, important locations that attracts traffic, busy intersections, existing road networks, land use – land cover and slope maps are considered. Each criteria map is ranked according to its suitability and weightage to each criteria is obtained by Analytical Hierarchical Process based on their relative importance to the selection process. Weighted overlay analysis is carried out using GIS by superimposing all the weighted criteria maps. As a result, four routes are selected as decision alternatives with four end stations (origin and destination stations) - two routes in south west to north east direction and two routes in east to west direction and intermediate stations are identified along the selected routes. Finally two routes (one in each direction) are proposed as optimal metro routes. The proposed metro lines can be extended to places that will be densely populated in future.