دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی بهبود تحلیل برنامه ریزی و تصمیم گیری: توسعه سیستم پشتیبانی برنامه ریزی - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

Planning Support Systems are spatially enabled computer based analytical tools. They are designed to process spatial data and model “what if” scenarios in support of planning analyses. This paper presents how an existing land-use planning software was customised to create the Walkability Planning Support System. The paper describes the tool features including: (i) automated calculation of built environment variables; (ii) “sketch planning” functionality; and (iii) suite of indicators including a walkability indicator that estimates the probability that an adult would walk for transport. We discuss how the Walkability PSS enables urban planners to explore built environment scenarios and visualise their potential impacts on walkability. We present a suburban case study where we compare a baseline scenario with an alternative scenario developed with local planners that incorporated possible built environment interventions. Finally, we discuss potential applications for the tool and present how it could be refined along with recommended research directions.

Conclusions

The Walkability PSS could be further developed to include other health and environmental outcomes as well as other built environment variables. For example, future PSS research could incorporate urban sustainability analyses and models (Chen and Crawford, 2015) into customised formulae. This would enable the environmental co-benefits of urban design interventions to be presented using interactive indicators within a PSS i.e., levels of greenhouse gas emission associated with planning scenarios as is included in another PSS such as the Envision Scenario Planner (ESP) tool (Trubka et al., 2016). As the complexity of developing PSSs increases, there is potential for PSSs to be abstracted from urban planners hindering their adoption for planning purposes (Waddell, 2011). Waddell (2011) explains that transparency matters for building trust and facilitating adoption since “models will not have credibility as tools for decision support in complex, conflictladen domains such as land use, transportation and environmental planning, unless they can be explained with a sufficient degree of transparency” (Waddell, 2011). Yet an over-simplification of models within PSSs also poses a problem as it reduces precision, validity and eventually credibility (Waddell, 2011). Hence, it is recommended that future research examines the trade-off of model complexity, transparency and PSS interactivity and further usability test be undertaken of the Walkability PSS tool to understand and address potential barriers of adoption by planning professionals.