| The motivation of the study is based on recognition that current spatial decision making problems, such as site selection, require proper means to handle the multiple socio-economic factors while considering physical suitability conditions. Decision support techniques that have been traditionally employed lack the capability to take into account these aspects simultaneously.;Although geographic information systems (GIS) have been widely recognized as a decision support technology in diverse areas, they do not provide decisionmaking modules that reason about a decision and are mainly based on manual techniques and human judgments for corresponding GIS operations. On the other hand, expert systems, which are gaining attention due to their ability to program experts' decision rules, show limitations including a failure to provide the means to access, analyze and visualize spatial data within the reasoning process and to consider the trade-offs among the decision criteria essential to multicriteria decision problems such as site selection.;With these research issues in mind, this study developed a strategy to facilitate the decisionmaking processes for industrial site selection in the presence of different priorities and uncertainties among the decision criteria. A framework for integrating the strengths of the Arc/Info GIS, the CLIPS expert system and the AHP multicriteria decision tool was developed and how the decisionmaker's preferences on a range of factors are systematically incorporated into the system to find optimally suitable sites was presented. The design and implementation of the system were illustrated with an application to a test regional study area for the industrial site selection problem.;The significance found in the research with respect to these technical enhancements can be summarized as follows: (i) the structured framework of the system helps in tackling complex and unstructured problems such as site selection while enabling the decisionmaker to conceptualize the problem and ensuring that crucial decision elements are not neglected; and (ii) the system integration along with iterative features contributes to making more systematic decisions by allowing the decisionmaker to examine the consequences of a series of decision scenarios and to revise them flexibly before arriving at a desired solution. |
