Land Suitability Analysis Multi Criteria Decision Making MCDM

2.7. Land Suitability Analysis

Land suitability analysis is an interdisciplinary approach by including the information from different domains like soil science, crop science, meteorology, social science, economics and management. Being interdisciplinary, land suitability analysis deals with information, which is measured in different scales like ordinal, nominal, and ratio scale. The process of land suitability classification is the evaluation and grouping of specific areas of land in terms of their suitability for a defined use. The main objective of the land suitability is the predictionevaluation of the inherent capacity of a land unit to support a specific land use for a long period of time without deterioration, in order to minimize the socio-economic and environmental costs Prakash T.N 2003. As mentioned earlier, determining suitable land for a particular use is a complex process involving multiple decisions that may relate to biophysical, socio-economic and institutionalorganizational aspects. Therefore, a structured and consistent approach to Land Suitability Analysis LSA is essential to decide the success of coastal development planning.

2.8. Multi Criteria Decision Making MCDM

There are many criteria upon which land suitability depends. The suitability analysis evaluates many alternative land use types under the light of various criteria from various streams. Alternatives here are competing with one another; criteria are both qualitative and quantitative. To address the spatial decision making, MCEMCA Multi Criteria 22 EvaluationAnalysis and GIS can be integrated Jankowski 1995. MCE seems to be applicable in GIS-based land suitability analysis Pereira and Duckstein 1993 for different coastal land uses. MCDM methods deal with real world problems that are multi dimensional in nature. When it comes to environmental issue the methods have to deal with heterogeneous criteria that are both qualitative and quantitative in nature. In order to incorporate heterogeneous information with different measurement scales, one has to bring them into a common domain of measurement. This process is called Standardization , a basic operation in MCE. Criteria should be standardized keeping in mind the goal and alternatives that are under evaluation. Standardization can change the outputs entirely if proper attention is not paid. For environmental criteria, there is a lack of valid and reliable standardization processes. Decision-making is a subjective process, as the perception regarding a problem can diverge from person to person. One cannot expect a decision maker or an expert to be highly consistent while dealing with such a subjective process. The real world problems are influenced by many natural factors and processes that are difficult to measure and model precisely. After the problem is evaluated for optimum conditions, sensitivity analysis assesses different conditions near the optimum values to check for the sensitivity of the criteria. Many decision-making methods lack a valid approach towards sensitivity analysis. Sensitivity analysis also aids in understanding the interaction between the criteria, dominant criterion and its effect, i.e. the variation in the final results when the weight of that criterion is varied. 23

2.9. Framework of Decision-Making and SMCDM