Spatial Group Decision Support System to Facilitate Site Selection Negotiation Process, Reduce Decision-Maker Conflict, and Augment System Performance

Introduction

The Decision support systems (DSS) are present in many areas and objectively assist the decision-maker with all the elements relevant to their task. However, traditional decision-making models adapted to the case of a single decision-maker do not accurately reflect the reality. Different and often conflicting views need to be considered to reach a compromise. Determining the optimal compromise is a permanent intellectual challenge in science and engineering. It has given rise to a new trend: group decision support or collective decision support.

Multi criteria analysis methods (MCAMs) do not have the capacity to store, manage, analyze, model, and display spatially referenced data for this problem. Several studies have used geographic information systems (GISs) to develop a multi criteria system to support spatial decision-making (Chakhar, 2006) (Sánchez-Lozano et al., 2013; Rikalovic et al., 2014).

Multi criteria decision support is, currently, considered as one of the most important branch of operational research and decision-making theory. It has become a well-established discipline that continues to attract many researchers and practitioners. In this article, the negotiation is simple. However, it might be confronted with a complex decision in which it is necessary to use negotiation with argumentation, as in (Oufella and Hamdadou, 2018), which proposed a framework for the argued negotiation of the GDSS (group decision support system) by combining agent technology with a GIS and multi criteria decision analysis. This framework helps decision-makers choose a compromise alternative among a number of possible solutions based argumentative approach, and leads to faster and more beneficial agreements for the group.

For this study, the authorscollected data from the Land Registry Department in Oran. They represent a set of land registry maps that give a graphical representation of the territory of the Misserghin community in all its fragmentation, details of sections, and islets. The owners are identified by a land registry template.

Our major contribution consists in developing a new spatial group decision support system. The latter combines a spatial ontology, a GIS, and MAS. These three modules are described in the following sections.