example, a government body might reduce taxes on
land allocated to a particular crop as an incentive to
its introduction. This is clearly a policy decision; but
it is the farmer who makes the decision about
whether to allocate land to that crop or not.
To be rational, decisions will be necessarily based
on one or more criteria – measurable attributes of
the alternatives being considered, that can be
combined and evaluated in the form of a decision
rule. In some circumstances, allocation decisions can
be made on the basis of a single criterion. However,
more frequently, a variety of criteria is required. For
example, the choice between a set of waste disposal
sites might be based upon criteria such as proximity
to access roads, distance from residential and
protected lands, current land use, and so on.
This chapter focuses on the very specific problems
of spatial resource allocation decisions in the
context of multiple criteria – a process most
commonly known as multi-criteria evaluation