Multiobjective decision support for land use planning

The overall objective of this paper is to show how a formal decision support method can be used effectively to support a land-use planning problem. Central to our approach is a heuristic algorithm based on a goal-programming/reference-point approach. The algorithm is tested on a small region in the Netherlands. To demonstrate the potential use of the algorithm, a planning problem is defined for this region. An interactive session with a land-use planner is then simulated, to show how feedback from the planner is used to generate a plan in a number of rounds. It is concluded that the approach has potential for the support of land-use problems especially in the first rounds of policy design as long as maps are used to interface between planner and algorithm. It is also shown that computational problems still hinder the achievement of realistic detail in the representation of the plan area.