A New Smart Approach for Best Location Determination Based on Internet of Things

Finding the best location among several alternatives require more effort, time, and devices in the usual cases, especially if these locations in another city or governorate. This study pursuit using a smart approach to select the best new primary school site with an accurate result in a short time and low cost. The presented approach utilizes a smartphone as an internet of things (IoT) device that has an internal Global Positioning System (GPS) unit to collect and send the location (GPS coordinates) via Google maps application to urban planners (decision-makers) to give their opinion in each site sent to them after making a spatial analysis for these site using the Arc GIS program to assess every advised site with each criterion. Then, the fuzzy TOPSIS method aggregates urban planners’ opinions to determine the more suitable site for a new primary school. The Fuzzy TOPSIS method was implemented using python code to reduce the time required for manual computation. All the Fuzzy TOPSIS steps executed time does not exceed 1 minute, and it just needs to enter the number of (criteria, decision-makers, and alternative sites). The importance weight of the criteria for each decision-maker and the ratings of alternative sites by the decision-makers’ chosen criteria. So with this smart approach, with a few hours, we can find a more fitting new site, although it took more than a week in the normal way.