Extending decision map concept to support participative spatial multicriteria decision making

The concept of decision map that we have introduced in a previous work is conceived to facilitate the use of multicriteria outranking relation-based decision rules in geographical information systems. The decision map looks like a set of homogenous spatial units; each one is characterized with a global, often ordinal, evaluation that represents an aggregation of several partial evaluations relative to different evaluation criteria. In this paper, the concept of decision map is extended to support participative spatial multicriteria decision making. We suppose that several groups or individuals are involved in a spatial decision making process. The objective is to generate a composite decision map that summarizes the preferences and objectives of all the participants in a collaborative and communicative decision process. The feasibility of the proposed extension and its utility in practice is showed through a hypothetical corridor identification problem with real data relative to the Ile-de-France region in France.