Landslides often cause significant casualties and economic losses, and therefore landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) has become increasingly urgent and important. The potential of deep learning (DL) like convolutional neural networks (CNN) based on landslide causative factors has not been fully explored yet. The main target of this study is the investigation of a GIS-based LSM in Zanjan, Iran and to explore the most important causative factor of landslides in the case study area. Different machine learning (ML) methods have been employed and compared to select the best results in the case study area. The CNN is compared with four ML algorithms, including random forest (RF), artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM), and logistic regression (LR). To do so, sixteen landslide causative factors have been extracted and their related spatial layers have been prepared. Then, the algorithms were trained with related landslide and non-landslide points. The results illustrate that the five ML algorithms performed suitably (precision = 82.43–85.6%, AUC = 0.934–0.967). The RF algorithm achieves the best result, while the CNN, SVM, the ANN, and the LR have the best results after RF, respectively, in this case study. Moreover, variable importance analysis results indicate that slope and topographic curvature contribute more to the prediction. The results would be beneficial to planning strategies for landslide risk management.

A comprehensive fire risk assessment is very important in dense urban areas as it provides an estimation of people at risk and property. Fire policy and mitigation strategies in developing countries are constrained by inadequate information, which is mainly due to a lack of capacity and resources for data collection, analysis, and modeling. In this research, we calculated the fire risk considering two aspects, urban infrastructure and the characteristics of a high-rise building for a dense urban area in Zanjan city. Since the resources for this purpose were rather limited, a variety of information was gathered and information fusion techniques were conducted by employing spatial analyses to produce fire risk maps. For this purpose, the spatial information produced using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and then attribute data (about 150 characteristics of each high-rise building) were gathered for each building. Finally, considering high-risk urban infrastructures, like the position of oil and gas pipes and electricity lines and the fire safety analysis of high-rise buildings, the vulnerability map for the area was prepared. The fire risk of each building was assessed and its risk level was identified. Results can help decision-makers, urban planners, emergency managers, and community organizations to plan for providing facilities and minimizing fire hazards and solve some related problems to reduce the fire risk. Moreover, the results of sensitivity analysis (SA) indicate that the social training factor is the most effective causative factor in the fire risk.

The urban land-use allocation problem is a spatial optimization problem that allocates optimum land-uses to specific land units in urban areas. This problem is an NP (nondeterministic polynomial time)-hard problem because of involving many objective functions, many constraints, and complex search space. Moreover, this subject is an important issue in smart cities and newly developed areas of cities to achieve a sustainable arrangement of land-uses. Different types ofMulti-Objective Optimization Algorithms (MOOAs) based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been frequently employed, but their ability and performance have not been evaluated and compared properly. This paper aims to employ and compare three commonly used MOOAs i.e. NSGA-II, MOPSO, and MOEA/D in urban land-use allocation problems. Selected algorithms belong to different categories of MOOAs family to investigate their advantage and disadvantages. The objective functions of this study are compatibility, dependency, suitability, and compactness of land-uses and the constraint is compensating of Per-Capita demand in the urban environment. Evaluation of results is based on the dispersion of the solutions, diversity of the solutions’ space, and comparing the number of dominant solutions in Pareto-Fronts. The results showed that all three algorithms improved the objective functions related to the current arrangement of the land-uses. However, the run time of NSGA-II is the worst, related to the Diversity Metric (DM) which represents the regularity of the distance between solutions at the highest degree. Moreover, MOPSO provides the best Scattering Diversity Metric (SDM) which shows the diversity of solutions in the solution space. Furthermore, In terms of algorithm execution time, MOEA/D performed better than the other two. So, Decision-makers should consider different aspects in choosing the appropriate MOOA for land-use management problems.

One of the important issues in Ubiquitous Geographic Information Science (GIS) is designing user-centric path finding algorithms to meet user needs. Mostly, in a route planning problem, the user’s purpose is optimization of two or more objective functions simultaneously. Thus, the problem is a multi-objective problem. In the present study, having considered multi-objective optimization methods in path finding, we developed an algorithm for solving this problem using an improved multi-objective ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. Modifications are introduced for various components of the ant colony metaheuristics; specifically, for those associated with the “ant decision rule”. The proposed algorithm was tested on the studied network. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach has acceptable settings, repeatability and run time. In addition, one of the important research outputs is a pareto-front which allows the user to select the final path according to the desired priorities.

A precise map of the dispersion of the groundwater potential across each watershed can help decision-makers to exert optimal water management in each region. In this research, the potential of groundwater resources in both the Zanjanrood Catchment and the Tarom Region, located in the northwest of Iran, has been studied. Seven effective criteria including slope, land-use, drainage density, spring density, lithology, lineament density, and rainfall are considered. Criteria were first weighted using the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) method and then overlaid by the Technique for Order Preferences by Similarity to Ideal (TOPSIS) model. Finally, the spatial zoning map of groundwater potential was obtained in four categories. A sensitivity analysis was performed to determine the influence of each criterion on the obtained map. The model was verified using both the spatial distribution of the high-discharged production wells and the geophysical-based geoelectric field surveys. The results indicate that the high-discharged wells (>40 l/s) in both regions are dispersed predominantly in the very good zone and, in several cases, in the good zone. Besides, the results from the two-dimensional models of resistivity and induced polarization of geoelectrical field survey are inappropriate agreement with those from the TOPSIS method. Notably, there is no suitable potential zone of groundwater in the surrounding highlands to be used in the future for drinking purposes since the highlands water supply is a strategic supply for drinking. The strategies employed in this study, the results of GIS modeling, and the geoelectrical analysis can be considered for sustainable development of similar arid and semi-arid areas since groundwater is considered as the main supplier of water in such regions.