Comprehensive decision-strategy space exploration for efficient territorial planning strategies

Comprehensive decision-strategy space exploration for efficient territorial planning strategies Olivier Billaud, 1, Maxence Soubeyrand, 1, Sandra Luque, 1 and Maxime Lenormand 1, † 1 TETIS, Univ Montpellier, AgroParisTech, Cirad, CNRS, Irstea, Montpellier, France Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is a well-known decision support tool that can be used in a wide variety of contexts. It is particularly useful for territorial planning in situations where several actors with different, and sometimes contradictory, point of views have to take a decision regarding land use development. While the impact of the weights used to represent the relative importance of criteria has been widely studied in the recent literature, the impact of order weights determination have rarely been investigated. This paper presents a spatial sensitivity analysis to assess the impact of order weights determination in Multi-Criteria Analysis by Ordered Weighted Averaging. We propose a methodology based on an efficient exploration of the decision-strategy space defined by the level of risk and tradeoff in the decision process. We illustrate our approach with a land use planning process in the South of France. The objective is to find suitable areas for urban development while preserving green areas and their associated ecosystem services. The ecosystem service approach has indeed the potential to widen the scope of traditional landscape-ecological planning by including ecosystem-based benefits, including social and economic benefits, green infrastructures and biophysical parameters in urban and territorial planning. We show that in this particular case the decision-strategy space can be divided into four clusters. Each of them is associated with a map summarizing the average spatial suitability distribution used to identify potential areas for urban development.