Workshop Description

Within the study on decision-making essence and its links with some strictly related concepts as evaluation and choice, it is possible to state that whereas decision can be mostly considered as a “political” process, evaluation mainly includes technical issues, while choice induces both sides problems.

• Evaluation concerns an initial phase of a cognitive process and the decision terms of reference defining the boundaries within which the entire process takes place and the evaluation purposes are defined.
• Decision is a deliberative act which temporarily closes a long and predominantly political process where the relationship among individuals of a community (and therefore among contrasting interests) needs to be regulated.
• Choice ends an evaluation process which aims to select a decisional alternative among many ones, on the base of different and often conflictual criteria and points of view. So it reminds the necessity to screen and compare many alternatives and to make a selection.

How does Information Technology application in spatial analysis modify the way of making decisions? Decision Theory based its fundamentals on limited sets of solution and evaluation criteria for a long time, but the way of describing spatial issues of governance, characters and constraints of physical space shows a further complexity that can not be described without the use of new methods, in order to increase decision quality. Even if the core nature of decision approach still remains the same, the number of complexities connected within the process increases rapidly. The interaction among evaluation methods, and the new described complexity of the physical urban space create a new era for spatial decision support involving several disciplines, and domains of knowledge.

In relation to what above, a decision process necessarily involves the existence of several social actors, usually called “stakeholders”, contributing to the final choice definition and enforcement; it is therefore important to stress the distinction between decision making and decision aiding, sometimes wrongly adopted as synonyms. While a decision maker is the subject able, at the same time, to give the knowledge and to have the responsibility to make a choice, a decision aiding context involves the existence of two distinctive subjects at least: the analyst (or a group of them) aiding the decision via a deep scientific knowledge and the client (public or private) to whom such support is directed. Therefore, in the first case the following elements are usually considered: a well defined set of possible decisional alternatives, a well defined preference system already clear in the decision maker mind and a correctly formulated mathematical problem. A decision aiding approach implies a set of not necessary stable potential actions compared on the base of n criteria able to reflect, under a natural uncertainty, the social actor preferences; in this case, then, a well formalized mathematical problem is quite impossible. In this context Intelligent Spatial Analysis Systems represent a fundamental support to decision making processes in conformity with a double reading perspective:

1. they comprise a coherent set of methods and techniques which enable to deepen the investigation on the scientific aspect of decision making process, adopting several rigorous tools and models belonging to different fields as machine learning (i.e. cellular automata, multi-agent systems, Bayesian networks, artificial neural networks, etc.), geostatistics (i.e. kernel methods, kriging, support vector machines, etc.), remote sensing, spatial data warehousing and Spatial OLAP, and spatial data mining;
2. they represent an innovative mean to enhance and guarantee participation (i.e. spatial multicriteria decision aiding, electronic meetings, focus groups, etc.), consensus building and communicability consensus building and communicability of decision making scenarios among stakeholders, in order to reach a transparent and accepted final choice.

The aim of the workshop is to investigate such connections among disciplines, by theoretical debates and tales on case studies.