Luis,

You should definitely try MACBETH (Bana e Costa & Vansnick, 1999; Bana e Costa et al., 2012). I have been using it since 1995 in consultancy projects and research (see, e.g., Oliveira & Lourenço, 2002; Bana e Costa et al. 2008 and 2014), and I found it easy to apply, because it only requires qualitative judgments to help a decision maker quantify the relative value of options.

Other multicriteria evaluation methods can be found in the book edited by Figueira et al. (2005).

References

Bana e Costa, C. A., De Corte, J. M., & Vansnick, J. C. (2012). MACBETH. International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making, 11(2), 359-387. doi: 10.1142/S0219622012400068

Bana e Costa, C. A., & Vansnick, J. C. (1999). The MACBETH approach: Basic ideas, software, and an application. In N. Meskens & M. R. Roubens (Eds.), Advances in Decision Analysis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 131-157.

Bana e Costa, C. A., Lourenço, J. C., Chagas, M. P., & Bana e Costa, J. C. (2008). Development of reusable bid evaluation models for the Portuguese Electric Transmission Company. Decision Analysis, 5(1), 22-42. doi: 10.1287/deca.1080.0104

Bana e Costa, C. A., Lourenço, J. C., Oliveira, M. D., & Bana e Costa, J. C. (2014). A socio-technical approach for group decision support in public strategic planning: The Pernambuco PPA case. Group Decision and Negotiation, 23(1), 5-29. doi: 10.1007/s10726-012-9326-2

Figueira, J., Greco, S., & Ehrgott, M. (Eds.). (2005). Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis: State of the Art Surveys. New York: Springer.

Oliveira, R. C., & Lourenço, J. C. (2002). A multicriteria model for assigning new orders to service suppliers. European Journal of Operational Research, 139(2), 390-399. doi: 10.1016/S0377-2217(01)00367-8

Dear Luís Quinta-Nova,

It is difficult to suggest one method with few information. The AHP method is easy to use, but it only deals at max with 9 criteria.

I really like The ELECTRE Family, and there are some workpaper using them in the suitanbility.

Here, attached in this message, i suggest you two papers that can help you to find out the best method for your problem.

The other paper. I can only attach one per message.

Thanks Henrique!

Luis: If it can help, we published a review paper on multicriteria decision making methods. It may help you get a sense of what exist and what they can be used for - http://www.mun.ca/geog/people/faculty/rdevillers/Greene_Geo_Compass_2011.pdf

Luis,

You should definitely try MACBETH (Bana e Costa & Vansnick, 1999; Bana e Costa et al., 2012). I have been using it since 1995 in consultancy projects and research (see, e.g., Oliveira & Lourenço, 2002; Bana e Costa et al. 2008 and 2014), and I found it easy to apply, because it only requires qualitative judgments to help a decision maker quantify the relative value of options.

Other multicriteria evaluation methods can be found in the book edited by Figueira et al. (2005).

References

Bana e Costa, C. A., De Corte, J. M., & Vansnick, J. C. (2012). MACBETH. International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making, 11(2), 359-387. doi: 10.1142/S0219622012400068

Bana e Costa, C. A., & Vansnick, J. C. (1999). The MACBETH approach: Basic ideas, software, and an application. In N. Meskens & M. R. Roubens (Eds.), Advances in Decision Analysis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 131-157.

Bana e Costa, C. A., Lourenço, J. C., Chagas, M. P., & Bana e Costa, J. C. (2008). Development of reusable bid evaluation models for the Portuguese Electric Transmission Company. Decision Analysis, 5(1), 22-42. doi: 10.1287/deca.1080.0104

Bana e Costa, C. A., Lourenço, J. C., Oliveira, M. D., & Bana e Costa, J. C. (2014). A socio-technical approach for group decision support in public strategic planning: The Pernambuco PPA case. Group Decision and Negotiation, 23(1), 5-29. doi: 10.1007/s10726-012-9326-2

Figueira, J., Greco, S., & Ehrgott, M. (Eds.). (2005). Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis: State of the Art Surveys. New York: Springer.

Oliveira, R. C., & Lourenço, J. C. (2002). A multicriteria model for assigning new orders to service suppliers. European Journal of Operational Research, 139(2), 390-399. doi: 10.1016/S0377-2217(01)00367-8

A lot of variants - UTA (software eg Visual UTA by Poznan Univeristy of Technology) or Electre (software eg. Diviz by Institut Télécom)

Few variants of land-suitability evaluation my proposal AHP or Electre (eg III).

Luis - note however that a lot of the methods mentioned here are not spatial (GIS) implementations of the methods, but standard multicriteria evaluation methods. If you require something spatially-explicit (which seems to be your initial question) I advise you focus on the GIS literature. Look for instance at the work of Malczewski (such as: Malczewski, J. (2006). GIS-based multicriteria decision analysis: a survey of the literature. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 20 (7), pp. 703–726)

Luís,

I advise you to use MACBETH as suggested by João Lourenço. MACBETH is based on value/utility measurment. Note that you should first strucuture your criteria in terms of what you want to do with it (in terms of agriculture and forestry). Break down your land area in unit parcels (polygons or raster mosaics) and then evaluate each unit according with the criteria. You will possibly have to deal with difficult value trade-offs between agriculture and forestry and MACBETH could help you on that. Besides the references from João Lourenço please take also a look at the attached paper with a more hands-on approach.

Please feel free to ask for further questions regarding your specific application.

Ricardo Mateus

PS: I definitely do not recommend you to use AHP nor Electre

Luís,

Just noticed that you are based in Portugal.

Therefore, if you rather want to read a MACBETH paper in Portuguese, take a look at the enclosed file.

Kindly,

Ricardo Mateus

Hola! debes buscar métodos que a la hora de agregar los criterios no admitan compensaciones, la sostenbilidad debe alcanzarse de la mejor manera posible en forma simultanea, te sugiero utilizar programación compromiso en su versión discreta. Un abrazo!

Hi,

Take a look at this paper as well:

http://www.international-agrophysics.org/artykuly/international_agrophysics/IntAgr_2011_25_4_311.pdf

Cheers,

Babak

Some comments:

- AHP has known mathematical drawbacks.

- Macbeth is a great methodology, but I am not sure it can be used in GIS, due to its pairwise comparison approach. For the same reason, but to a lesser extend, Electre methods might not be the best candidates.

- Altogether, an sound additive method used in a way to avoid known mistakes might be the best way for your case.

Luis,

One may say AHP is suitable enough to conduct a multi-criteria evaluation while another wont suggest that to you. Because this method has both advantages and disadvantages... the disadvantage (like uncertainty about the criteria and alternatives ) of this method in such studies you are working on may make you and the expert respondent to make it wrong. maybe its not about method... its about the way you or the experts are working with. if someone handle this disadvantage (like performing Sensitivity Analysis) he may get a good result...

Here you can find an article which i have used both AHP and Delphi in this work.... and i found Delphi better and more practical than AHP. Just take a look at the website.

Good luck.

Elyas Hayati

Article An expert-based approach to forest road network planning by ...

You can read this

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016706109000676

Sometimes we use an Hybrid Approach with simulation model application and standard land evaluation, in order to consider the system soil-plant and atmosphere dynamically and some important key features that generally are not used in the simulation modelling application

I think if you really want to do spatial analysis it's rather complex. I agree with a Bofante.

We're currently developing a spatial decision support tool (sDSS), called "Green Landscapes" which is based on a GIS interface, coupled with models for prediction of ecosystem services to model the biophysical parts of the ecosystem services and a AHP module that includes a participatory planning process in order to prioritise ecosystem services for a catchment.

You're welcome to ask me if you want to have more details on the Green Landscapes DSS.

We have also developed a web -GIS DSS. LIFE+ SOILCONSWEB project.

The SOILCONSWEB LIFE + project aims to create a decision support system operating at the landscape scale (S-DSS) for the protection and the management of soils in both agricultural and environmental scenarios; it operates through the web by the web site (http://www . landconsultingweb.eu /).

The system can analyse environmental factors concerning a region of interest freely selected (in real time) by the end user through the web. The system will then produce a series of detailed information regarding that specific area of interest including physical factors of the landscape (soils, climate, geology, etc..), viticulture suitability, phytopathology, trend of the viticulture year, etc.

The system includes tools based on modelling procedures at different level of complexity some of which specifically designed for viticulture issues. One of the implemented models arise from the original desktop based SWAP model (Kroes et al, 2008). It can be run “on the fly” through a very user friendly web-interface. ( thanks to the model based on the Richard’s equation can produce data on vineyard water stress, simulating the soil water balances of the different soil types within an area of interest).

Thanks to a specific program developed within the project activities, the Spatial-DSS every day acquires punctual weather data and automatically spatialize them with geostatistical approaches in order to use the data as input for the SPA (Soil Plant Atmosphere ) model running.

Decision makers (individuals, groups of interests and public bodies) through the DSS can have real-time (or near real-time) access to critical, accurate, complete and up-to-date spatial data/output models held/processed in multiple data stores. It produces detailed spatial documents, report and maps on a series of questions. (E.g. In vitivulture the identification and description of terroir

characteristics.)

I found this brand new workpaper today, and maybe can help you in yout decision.

GIS-based photovoltaic solar farms site selection using ELECTRE-TRI: Evaluating the case for Torre Pacheco, Murcia, Southeast of Spain

Link attached.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148114000093

It is difficult to suggest only one method like as AHP or ELECTRE etc.

I hope these paper help you.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837709000581

And

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF03326051

Dear Luis

Firstly, you need to verify if the effect of compensation among the criteria is desirable or not in your application.

Dear Luis,

It depends how you are willing to approach your problem. If you would like to use a linear value function, then AHP might be suitable for you. If you are able to present your problem as a multiple Objective LInear Programming model, then you can find many suitable softwares. If you think that you can generate a large (even huge) set of scenarios, from among which you would like to find the most preferred one, then I can recommend an appraoch in the paper: Concilio, G., Korhonen, P., and Soismaa, M. (1999): "Rank Order for a Rehabilitation Program Using Multiple Criteria", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, Vol. 26, N:o 5, pp. 711-726.