Risk informed decision making in land use planning

The objective of the paper is to present a multicriteria decision methodology for supporting decisions about patterns of land development in the vicinity of major hazard installations. The proposed methodology is based on the paradigm of Multicriteria Decision Analysis and aims at integrating the results of risk analysis of major hazard installations with models for land use planning. The methodology possesses two main features: it is interactive and it does not require assessment of value tradeoffs prior to assessing the most preferred land use pattern. The latter is achieved by determining the efficient set of land use patterns by means of a dynamic programming-based algorithm. The proposed methodology and the use of the efficient set of solutions in supporting land use planning decisions are demonstrated through an application. Four criteria are used in the application, three referring to risk and one to the benefits of alternative land use patterns, although the methodology can accept any number of decision criteria as well as various types of land development. A computerized decision support system has been developed to implement the proposed methodology.