Accessibility-based multicriteria analysis for facility siting

Maximizing accessibility is often an important consideration in the location of a facility. This paper describes the development of a planning procedure based on a geographic information system (GIS) to assist decision makers in site selection when various accessibility criteria are considered. The procedure is illustrated in the context of siting a new women's and children's community center in Tucson, Arizona. First, suitable sites are identified as candidates on the basis of constraints related to transportation, land use, zoning, and so forth. Then a GIS-based decision support system is designed to assess the optimality of the candidate sites on the basis of accessibility by different population groups modeled, with the use of a multiobjective mathematical programming approach. Although this analysis focuses on a single facility, the methodology discussed, including the use of visual assessment tools and the development of the optimization model, can be used for multiple site selection and easily extended to other applications in which accessibility is a key component.