Multi-actor Dimensions and Cross System Levels Considerations in Spatial Decision Support

The spatial dimension of human settlements and establishments raises special decision problems in planning situations. Often there are multitudes of different criteria that have to be considered. Real world phenomena, in opposite to phenomena of an idealised mathematical or abstract world, are often vague, contradictory, and incomprehensible. Further, decisions about our physical environment often are of a multi criteria nature. We have in earlier research developed and tested the Ordered Weighted Average Procedure (OWA-procedure) for decision support in complex localisation decisions in physical planning outgoing from the basic methodologies for a multi criteria fuzzv decision support that already have been developed. However, the OWA-procedure in its current form is not able to capture the full complexitv of most real decision situations. Some shortcomings of the OWA-procedure are its inability to consider several interesting parts and combine criteria from different system levels. For example, a location which is verv suitable for an individual land owner or establisher may have severe drawbacks from the point of view of others stakeholders or even the whole community. In order to make OWA more suitable for those common situations the prototype is extended with functions for averaging between different value sets and cross level impact analysis.