Decision support for fuzzy comprehensive evaluation of urban development

Urban development often impacts the economic development pattern and the sp acial distribution of resource allocation of a particular area. Urban devel opment can be conceptualized as a multicriteria decision-making problem; th erefore, multicriteria evaluation has been used to trace the trend of urban development, In this paper, a fuzzy multicriteria evaluation model is deve loped to study the trend of urban development. First, a multilayer evaluati on 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 inclu de the fuzzy evaluation models under different evaluation rules, the method s used to determine the weights of criteria, and the determination of the m embership grades of evaluation matrix. The model has been implemented and t he application results indicate that the proposed model is able to represen t those important factors affecting urban development layer-by-layer and st age-by-stage. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.