Spatial Group Decision Support System to Facilitate Site Selection Negotiation Process, Reduce Decision-Maker Conflict, and Augment System Performance

Abstract

The selection of a suitable land requires careful thought and several criteria must be taken into account to ensure a good decision. Typically, selection processes are based on face-to-face meetings. But this strategy focuses on simple predefined searches and selections according to some basic criteria, such as land price, etc. They do not take into account spatially explicit criteria and spatial analyzes relevant to a site selection process (for example, proximity to hospital). To overcome these limitations, the proposed system relies on the integration of four key concepts: a multi-agent system, a multi-criteria method, geographic and ontological information systems. The results of the implementation provide manageability of large data storage. Despite the large number of approaches integrating geographic information systems and multicriteria analyzes, their use, in practice, is limited because they lack data semantics. As a result, the concept of ontology which introduces the semantics of the proposed approach offers many possibilities in terms of the type of terrain.