Mobile Maps and More - Extending Location-Based Services with Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis

Maps are often used as decision support tools in both, desktop geographic information systems (GIS) and mobile GIS environments. The decision support capabilities of current location-based services (LBS) are limited to navigation support and database querying with no analytic evaluation of the attractiveness of alternative destinations being offered. This chapter demonstrates how LBS can be extended with specific decision support functionality, namely multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). MCDA was recently transferred to the mobile GIS platform illustrating how LBS user preferences can be represented by the parameters in a MCDA method and will lead to personalized decision outcomes. An extension to a collaborative crisis management scenario is proposed, in which mobile decision-makers have MCDA tools at hand to help them make more informed choices. This chapter describes the scenario and derives a client/server architecture as well as the user interface and map design for a mobile decision support system for emergency response. In both, desktop geographic information systems (GIS) and mobile GIS applications, maps often serve as decision support tools. At present, the decision support capabilities of location-based services (LBS) are limited to navigation support and database querying. For example, an LBS may indicate a nearby point of interest to the mobile user and the shortest way to access it. However, the choice between different possible destinations will be left to the user, and no analytic evaluation of the attractiveness of the alternatives is being offered. GIS have been described as generators for spatial decision support systems (SDSS), which are specialized applications providing decision support tools to decision-makers. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods form a group of such decision support tools. MCDA aggregates standardized attributes of decision alternatives into an evaluation score for each alternative, thus making it possible to rank alternatives based on their performance. MCDA was introduced to GIS in the context of site selection and land-use allocation in the 1990s (Malczewski 1999).