An Online Multicriteria—Spatial Decision Support System for Public Services Planning

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Featured Application: The developed prototype is a tool to evaluate a supply situation and to plan required infrastructures more efficiently and precisely. It is part of a proposal for an integrated planning tool that covers several areas of supply planning. Dynamic processes in society and demographics require a rapid response and adaptation of the existing public service infrastructure. Responsible planners must be able to analyse the situation, identify gaps in provision and derive decisions. The paper presents a web application that supports finding answers to various questions and planning decisions in the context of public service infrastructures (e.g., schools, pharmacies, supermarkets). Due to the high complexity, the combination of multi-criteria decision analysis and geographical information systems, especially in the web context, is still rarely implemented. With this spatial decision support system, we are pursuing an approach that makes multi-criteria analyses with spatially explicit methods available to the planning domain. By using this application, the user can select and adjust input parameters independently and thus strongly influence the analysis process and results—without a deep knowledge of decision-making methods or software skills. With such a centrally provided online multi-criteria spatial decision support system, the transparency and the quality of the analysis increase, while the workload for the planners is reduced, since they no longer have to spend time on preliminary data search and integration or on building complex methods and models themselves.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number1526
Number of pages18
JournalApplied sciences
Volume14 (2024)
Issue number4
Publication statusPublished - 14 Feb 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0009-0000-9858-7230/work/153654415
ORCID /0000-0002-9016-1996/work/153654751
Scopus 85192441459
Mendeley d01de1cc-60ed-3d5a-9de2-e45712c0ca49

Keywords

Keywords

  • GIS, distance decay, multi-criteria analyses, planning tool, public service, services of general interest, spatial decision support system, web-application