A group multicriteria spatial decision support system for parking site selection problem: A case study

Tehran, the capital of Iran and one of the largest cities in the world, faces uncontrolled urban expansion. Over the last few decades, urban expansion and traffic congestion in Tehran has greatly increased the demand for public parking facilities. In recent years, urban policy makers and the local municipalities of Tehran have focused their efforts on increasing the number of public parking facilities in different areas of the city. Their approach to parking site selection has been centralized, and has received some criticism for a perceived failure to represent certain interest groups and stakeholders coupled with an inability to provide a platform for active participation and collaboration. Due to many conflicting issues, the number of factors inherent to parking site selection, the increasing diversity of expertise areas, and the current trend to democratize planning, the use of participatory or collaborative planning methods for parking site selection has proven to be more effective. This paper presents a Web-based group GIS-MCDA procedure and tool to address the issue of parking site selection in Tehran. The integration of GIS and Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) capabilities into the Web platform offers an effective Multicriteria Spatial Decision Support System (MC-SDSS) with which to involve stakeholders and other groups in site selection processes. Such a system makes it possible to find appropriate sites that may reconcile the conflicting objectives resulting from different opinions and the final site selection outcome that can be accepted by the majority. The paper demonstrates the implementation of the proposed system for tackling the parking site selection problem in the center of District # 22 of Tehran.