Decision support for fuzzy comprehensive evaluation of urban development

Urban development often impacts the economic development pattern and the spacial distribution of resource allocation of a particular area. Urban development can be conceptualized as a multicriteria decision-making problem; therefore, multicriteria evaluation has been used to trace the trend of urban development, In this paper, a fuzzy multicriteria evaluation model is developed to study the trend of urban development. First, a multilayer evaluation index system is presented; it is used to conduct horizontal analysis on urban systems. Second, a fuzzy, multicriteria, multilayer evaluation model is proposed, Third, the detailed modeling aspects are discussed which include the fuzzy evaluation models under different evaluation rules, the methods used to determine the weights of criteria, and the determination of the membership grades of evaluation matrix. The model has been implemented and the application results indicate that the proposed model is able to represent those important factors affecting urban development layer-by-layer and stage-by-stage. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.