Spatial Multicriteria Decision Making

DEFINITION Multicriteria analysis is generally defined as “a decision-aid and a mathematical tool allowing the comparison of different alternatives or scenarios according to many criteria, often conflicting, in order to guide the decision maker towards a judicious choice” [12]. The set of decision alternatives considered in a given problem is often denoted by A and called the set of potential alternatives. A criterion is a function g, defined on A, taking its values in an ordered set and representing the decision maker’s preferences according to some points of view. The evaluation of an alternative a according to criterion g is written g(a). Spatial multicriteria decision making refers to the application of multicriteria analysis in spatial context where alternatives, criteria and other elements of the decision problem have explicit spatial dimensions. Since the late 1980s, multicriteria analysis has been coupled with geographical information systems (GIS) to enhance spatial multicriteria decision making.