Title: Determining the implementation order of a general plan by using a multicriteria method

Authors: Joonas Hokkanen, Risto Lahdelma, Kaisa Miettinen and Pekka Salminen

Status: Journal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, 7, 1998, pp. 273-284.

Keywords: Multicriteria decision making; group decision making; environmental planning; municipal planning; general plan

We describe a real-life application of a new multicriteria method in the context of assisting the decision-making for a general plan in the municipality of Kirkkonummi in Uusimaa, Finland. At the time our group started working on the problem, a proposal for an overall plan had already been completed, but the order in which different regional parts of the plan should be implemented needed to be considered based on the environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedure. The EIA procedure generated a large amount of data about the different impacts of the alternatives. For this group decision making problem we developed the SMAA-3 decision support method which does not require any explicit preference information from the decision makers during the procedure. The uncertainty of the basic data is modelled using ELECTRE III-type pseudo-criteria with preference and indifference thresholds.