A spatial group decision support system: Coupling negotiation and multicriteria approaches

Territorial decision problems have a spatial complex nature which is also multidimensional, interdisciplinary, poorly defined and requiring the definition of several criteria with dissimilar importance. These types of problem involve many decision makers (individuals and institutions), with conflicting interests, preferences and points of view. In the current study, our contribution focuses on the design and development of a multicriteria spatial group decision support system to conduct the spatial localization process in Territory Planning: the problem that involves finding a surface that best meets certain criteria from a set of variants (the location of infrastructure: shopping center, hospital, school,...). The suggested system SIGMAS allows taking into account both the spatial dimension as well as specific and divergent interests of different decision makers to reach an acceptable agreement. In this context, the proposed SGDSS is based on the coupling of two representations of reality: Multi Agent Systems (MAS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). We endow the MAS with a negotiation protocol based on mediation, featuring a coordinator agent responsible for the smooth conduct of negotiation and a set of participant agents representing different decision makers impacted by the decision in TP. This protocol exploits, also, multicriteria analysis methods namely ELECTRE III and ELECTRE TRI.