# An Online Multicriteria--Spatial Decision Support System for Public Services Planning
## 2 Preliminary Remarks and Basic Systematisation
### Web-Based Multicriteria Analysis Methods for Spatial Decision Support Systems  
As [PERSON] summarised 15 years ago, combined research on GIS and MCDA has focused on technical aspects of integrating MCDA and GIS methods (MCDA, 2012) (p. 718). According to him, finding solutions for real spatial problems was a downstream concern, as certain progress in technical integration between MCDA and GIS fields of work had to be achieved first. Since then, a large number of publications have appeared that attempt to solve spatial problems with the help of MCDA methods in combination with spatial analytical methods (cf. (MCDA, 2012; 2013; 2014; 2015; 2016; 2017; 2018; 2019)). However, looking at the methods of the mentioned literature, even today another point of [PERSON]'s cannot be completely invalidated (MCDA, 2012) (p. 718): Some MCDA methods have a number of strict assumptions that are difficult to substantiate in real situations or use methodologically simplified models of spatial analysis procedures. From his perspective, these points would be largely ignored by the GIS-MCDA community (status 2006). Together with [PERSON], [PERSON] recently stated that a large part of GIS-MCDA studies are (still) spatially implicit (P. 1258). This means that evaluation criteria are defined based on the concept of spatial relationships such as proximity, neighbourhood, and contiguity. And even if some recent work indicates a paradigm shift towards spatially explicit analysis methods, the path to MCDA methods that explicitly takes spatial variability into account has not yet been fully trodden. The web application presented in this paper provides an MCDA approach based on spatially explicit criteria such as accessibility and distance decay. The application allows the user to choose from different distance decay options for the given infrastructures. The distance decays are calculated using network analysis components (via an OpenStreetMap road network). Since the turn of the millennium, web-based decision support tools are receiving more attention in research (examples include (MCDA, 2012; 2013; 2014)). Nevertheless, the results of these studies should rather be considered as feasibility and perspective studies or to only implement partial technical aspects of a GIS-MCDA. To the best knowledge of the authors, comprehensive online MCDA tools do not exist. Even though the corona pandemic has given a real boost to new web-based presentation and data analysis tools, such as dashboards with map integration, the resulting COVID-19 tools for planners and interested citizens often have only rudimentary GIS or geo-operations in use (MCDA, 2012). Even if there are certain differences in the comparison of the dashboards (MCDA, 2012) (p. 3), they are mainly used for the daily visualisation of infection events or the regional health status of the population. Examples of this are the description of a global dashboard for the WHO by (MCDA, 2012), for Ghana by (MCDA, 2012), for Mexico by (MCDA, 2012), and for Germany by (MCDA, 2012). Further, there are numerous works that take an analytical approach by combining MCDA and spatial analytical methods to support planners and governments in decision making. Examples are studies on risks estimation of overshoot of regional hospital bed capacities for Brazil (P. 1258) and analyses to ensure national food supply in case of production losses on agricultural land, as in Nepal (Nepal, 2013) or China (Nepal, 2013). However, these studies do not include web components. Online GIS applications for public administration, of which the level of interaction goes beyond dashboards and which incorporate spatial MCDA analyses in the stricter sense, do not exist yet. This applies in particular to online systems that provide dynamic user interaction options for the GIS and MCDA functionalities. Currently, the results of MCDA are often static maps that are partly presented online.