Multicriteria analysis and geographical information systems: an application to agricultural land use in the netherlands

Abstract

Regional and urban planning problems are often hard to solve for various reasons. Large amounts of data are needed, due to the number of spatial units involved or the range of phenomena taken into account. Uncertainties of various kinds have an important influence on technological developments and on the decisions of policy makers at the macrolevel. Another reason why these planning problems are so difficult is that political conflicts between spatial units or between policy objectives are intense. Geographical information systems have been designed to contribute to the solution of such planning problems. For this purpose, GIS systems have been supplied with various facilities for analysis, modelling and forecasting. Here, we consider the integration of GIS with another facility: multicriteria analysis (MCA), which aims at analysing the intensity and nature of conflicts between policy criteria, generating compromise alternatives and rankings of alternatives according to their degree of attractiveness. Thus, linking GIS with MCA enables policy conflicts to be analysed in a spatial context.