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The aim of this paper is to clarify the spatial multi‐criteria workflow for stakeholders and decision makers, for which feedback rankings are vital to the success of the transportation planning.

The experimental approach was designed to integrate in a novel fashion both analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and multi‐criteria decision making (MCDM) within a geospatial information system (GIS) framework to deliver visual and objective tabular results useful to estimate environmental costs of the alignments generated. The method enables ranking, prioritization, selection, and refinement of preferred alternatives. The Interstate‐269, the newly planned bypass of Memphis‐TN, for which a recent environmental impact study (EIS) was completed, was selected as the experiment test‐bed.

The results indicate that the approach can automate the delivery of feasible alignments that closely approximate those generated by traditional approaches. Furthermore, via integration of local planning and ancillary spatial data, the method provided alignment results that avoided areas where local opposition was noted in the EIS. This enhanced method based on remote sensing and spatial information technologies delivers low or high‐predicted environmental costs per feature criteria and cumulative predicted costs while preserving local values and plans.

The method is highly transferable and limited solely by the availability of sources of geospatial data and coordination with stakeholders. The approach was implemented to derive results similar to traditional approaches with benefits in time, costs, and quality of solutions.

A novel adaptation of MCDM and AHD within a spatial decision‐making framework is presented. The paper suggests a clarification of multi‐criteria workflow to design and select least‐environmental‐cost corridors. The case study application provides a starting point to develop practical tools that delivers environmental benefits through a collaborative process capturing stakeholder values and decision maker opinions.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the vulnerability of the Kesennuma area in Japan to a tsunami disaster and to map the area of inundation.

Digital elevation model (DEM) data and ALOS image were used to create maps of the parameters of this study area: elevation, slope, coastal proximity, river, and land use. An analytical hierarchy process was used to assign weights to each parameter and a spatial multi-criteria analysis was applied through cell-based modelling for vulnerability mapping.

The vulnerability map shows that 17.679 km2 of the area could be inundated by a tsunami. High vulnerability areas were mostly found in coastal areas with a sloping coast and a cape area. A low elevation and the presence of rivers or water channels are factors that increase the impact of tsunamis. Inundation areas were predicted to spread in areas identified as having either high vulnerability or slightly high vulnerability.

Because of the limited geospatial data, the authors encourage further studies using DEM data with a high spatial resolution.

The results of this research can be used as basic information for disaster mitigation and urban planning in coastal areas.

This research creates a new approach for assessing which areas could be inundated by tsunamis, based on the vulnerability map generated through remote sensing and spatial multi-criteria analysis. Moreover, the parameters used are very close to those of actual inundation maps.

The rising proportion of internet users in Sub-Saharan Africa and the lack of analytical techniques, as decision support systems, in choosing among alternative internet service providers (ISPs) by consumers underpin this study. The purpose of this paper is to propose an approach for evaluating high-speed internet service offered by ISPs in a sub-Saharan African country.

Using a sample size of 150, pairwise comparisons of two ISPs along five criteria of cost, usability, support, reliability and speed were performed by ten person groups of university students working in various organizations in Ghana and undertaking an online Six Sigma Course. Geometric means were employed to aggregate the scores in 15 groups, and these scores were then normalized and used as input into an analytical hierarchy process grid.

The results show that consumers of internet services highly emphasize the cost attribute of internet provision in their decision making. On the other hand, it was realized that consumers least emphasize the support provided by ISPs in their decision making among alternative ISPs.

This study has sought to provide an analytical framework for assessing the quality of service provided by alternative ISPs in a developing economy’s context. The evaluating criteria in this framework also reveal the key consumer requirements in internet service provision in a developing economy’s environment. This, to a large extent, will inform the marketing strategies of existing ISPs in Ghana as well as prospective ones intending to enter the Ghanaian market. Besides, the National Communication Authority, a regulator of communication services provision in Ghana, will be informed about the performances of the ISPs along five performance criteria. This is expected to aid in their regulatory functions.

Based on the theoretical viewpoints of criminal geography and environmental criminology, this research uses spatial multi-criteria decision-making methods. In the process of spatial decision-making and optimization of police resources, researchers fully consider the dynamic application of Geographic Information System (GIS) and the effects of spatial prevention and control.

Researchers use an integrated method combining Policing Geographic Information System (PGIS) and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). On the one hand, police GIS has an excellent visual data analysis platform and integrated decision support system in data management, spatial analysis, data exploration and regression analysis. On the other hand, through the design of the indicator system, the quantification of indicators, the determination of weights, comprehensive evaluation and sensitivity analysis, MCDA can select the best plan from a large number of alternatives. When joining MCDA, the spatial dimension will bring the research results closer to the real world.

The study finds that the crime of burglary is affected to a certain extent by the distribution of police forces, the location of police units. Another important finding of this research is the correlation between more precise preventive measures and the crime of burglary.

From a practical point of view, this research would help advance the role of police units and law enforcement agencies in preventing burglary crimes and provide experience for the allocation of regional police resources.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the potential geographic locations for ecotourism activities and to select the best one among alternatives.

The proposed model consists of four sequential phases. In the first phase, different geographic criteria are determined based on existing literature, and data are gathered using GIS. On equal criteria weighing, alternative locations are determined using GIS in the second phase. In the third phase, the identified criteria are weighted using analytical hierarchy process (AHP) by various stakeholders of potential ecotourism sites. In the fourth phase, the PROMETHEE method is applied to determine the best alternative based on the weighted criteria.

A framework including four sequential steps is proposed. Using real data from the Black Sea region in Turkey, the authors test the applicability of the evaluation approach and compare the best alternative obtained by the proposed method for nine cities in the region. Consequently, west of Sinop, east of Artvin and south of the Black Sea region are determined as very suitable locations for ecotourism.

The first limitation of the study is considered the number of included criteria. Another limitation is the use of deterministic parameters that do not cope with uncertainty. Further research can be conducted for determining the optimum locations for different types of tourism, e.g. religion tourism, hunting tourism and golf tourism, for effective tourism planning.

The proposed approach can be applied to all area that cover the considered criteria. The approach has been tested in the Black Sea region (nine cities) in Turkey.

Using the proposed approach, decision-makers can determine locations where environmentally responsible travel to natural areas to enjoy and appreciate nature that promotes conservation have a low visitor impact and provide for beneficially active socioeconomic involvement of local individuals.

To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first study which applies a GIS-based multi-criteria decision-making approach for ecotourism site selection.

Crop suitability analysis is vital for identifying a piece of land’s potential for sustainable crop production and aids in the formulation of an effective agricultural management plan. This study aims to conduct crop suitability analysis of prominent Kharif (rice and maize) and Rabi (potato and wheat) crops in Sirajganj district, a flood-prone area of Bangladesh, and recommend a suitable cropping pattern to mitigate the detrimental effects of flooding.

Various factors such as soil drainage, soil depth, soil moisture, soil texture, soil permeability, soil pH, erosion hazard, nutrient status and flooding risk were considered for this study. For all four crops, the weights of each factor were determined using the analytical hierarchy process approach, and the scores of each subfactor were assigned on the basis of favorable circumstances of crop cultivation. Using the weighted overlay analysis in the ArcGIS 10.3 environment, the crop suitability maps were generated and were divided into four suitable classes. Geographic information system integration of crop suitability for all the crops determined the suitable cropping pattern of the study area in Kharif and Rabi seasons.

A vast portion of the study area covering 64.80% of the total land is suitable for cultivating either rice or maize in Kharif season followed by either potato or wheat in Rabi season. Other suitable cropping pattern for Kharif and Rabi seasons found in the study area are rice-wheat, rice-wheat/potato, rice/maize-wheat and rice/maize-potato, which covers a little portion of the study area.

This research validates the suitable location of crop cultivation on the basis of flooding occurrences in the locality.

The purpose of this paper is to perform a systematic review on the application of different multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods in solving the site selection problem across multiple problem domains. The domains are energy generation, logistics, public services and retail facilities. This study aims to answer the following research questions: Which evaluating criteria were used for each site selection problem domain? Which MCDM methods were frequently applied in a particular site selection problem domain?

The goals of the systematic review were to identify the evaluating criteria as well as the MCDM method used for each problem domain. A total of 81 recent papers (2014–2018) including 32 papers published in conference proceedings and 49 journal articles from various databases including IEEE Xplore, PubMed, Springer, Taylor and Francis as well as ScienceDirect were evaluated.

This study has shown that site selection for energy generation facilities is the most active site selection problem domain, and that the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method is the most commonly used MCDM method for site selection. For energy generation, the criteria which were most used were geographical elements, land use, cost and environmental impact. For logistics, frequently used criteria were geographical elements and distance, while for public services population density, supply and demand, geographical layout and cost were the criteria most used. Criteria useful for retail facilities were the size (space) of the store, demographics of the site, the site characteristics and rental of the site (cost).

This study is limited to reviewing papers which were published in the years 2014–2018 only, and only covers the domains of energy generation, logistics, public services and retail facilities.

MCDM is a viable tool to be used for solving the site selection problem across the domains of energy generation, logistics, public services and retail facilities. The usage of MCDM continues to be relevant as a complement to machine learning, even as data originating from embedded IoT devices in built environments becomes increasingly Big Data like.

Previous systematic review studies for MDCM and built environments have either focused on studying the MCDM techniques itself, or have focused on the application of MCDM for site selection in a single problem domain. In this study, a critical review of MCDM techniques used for site selection as well as the critical criteria used during the MCDM process of site selection was performed on four different built environment domains.

For some specific multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems, especially in emergency situations, because of the feature of criteria and other fuzzy factors, it is more appropriate that values of different criteria are expressed in their correspondingly appropriate value types. The purpose of this paper is to build a multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) model dealing with heterogeneous information based on distance-based VIKOR to solve emergency supplier selection in practice appropriately and flexibly, where a compromise solution is more acceptable and suitable.

This paper extends the classical VIKOR to a generalized distance-based VIKOR to handle heterogeneous information containing crisp number, interval number, intuitionistic fuzzy number and hesitant fuzzy linguistic value, and develops an MCGDM model based on the distance-based VIKOR to handle the multi-criteria heterogeneous information in practice. This paper also introduces a parameter called non-fuzzy degree for each type of heterogeneous value to moderate the computation on aggregating heterogeneous hybrid distances.

The proposed distance-based model can handle the heterogeneous information appropriately and flexibly because the computational process is directly operated on the heterogeneous information based on generalized distance without a transformation process, which can improve the decision-making efficiency and reduce information loss. An example of emergency supplier selection is given to illustrate the proposed method.

This paper develops an MCGDM model based on the distance-based VIKOR to handle heterogeneous information appropriately and flexibly. In emergency supplier selection situations, the proposed decision-making model allows the decision-makers to express their judgments on criteria in their appropriate value types.

As in line with eco benchmarking, the purpose of this paper is to solve a location selection problem in an emerging country by applying sustainability benchmarking principles.

A hybrid multi-criteria decision-making method, fuzzy AHP and Preference Ranking Organization METHod for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMETHEE), is used as methodology to make sustainability benchmarking for logistics center location selection.

It is revealed that according to AHP and PROMETHEE calculations, Kemalpasa is determined as the most appropriate location from the sustainable perspectives. Torbali is specified as the worst location to construct a logistics center in terms of benchmarking criteria based on sustainability concerns. Based on these numerical results, managerial implications are presented with a sustainability benchmarking view.

The main originality of this study is integrating one of the relatively new topics, sustainability benchmarking, with a popular area, logistics center location selection.

Cesspits are the means for each house to dispose of wastewater in the Bani Kinanah District (BKD) of Jordan, which creates severe environmental complications. This research aimed to find a suitable site for a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) in BKD.

Geographic Information System (GIS)-based multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) was used for an optimal site selection for a sewage treatment plant. Several datasets were obtained to prepare the maps of the criteria influencing the choice of the most suitable site for the WWTP. The analytic hierarchy process was used to apply the weights for each factor.

Five classes of suitability were generated: 0.23% very high suitability, 8.49% high suitability, 47.12% moderate suitability, 37.67% low suitability and 6.49% very low suitability. According to Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) results, the elevations, slope and groundwater depth have high importance; where their weights 21%, 19% and 17%, respectively. The most suitable site for establishing a WWTP was found in the northern part of the study area, where it is characterized by relatively low elevations (−90 to −93 m), low slope (0–2.5 %), distance from groundwater level (47–82 m) and the space is sufficient for building the plant (25328 m², 8861 m² and 8586 m²).

This research is limited by the availability of data.

The research is invaluable for decision makers involved in urban planning.

Wastewater treatment plants are essential for communities with limited resources such as Jordan. It has also profound impacts on the surrounding environment.

From the present study, it can be concluded that GIS is essential in urban utility establishment, like urban domestic wastewater treatment site selection. Although the study area has adequate potential areas for establishing WWTP, further assessment of flood vulnerability, wastewater amount quantification, population growth and urban expansion must be seriously considered before implementation.