DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS PER LA PIANIFICAZIONE TERRITORIALE

1. Knowledge and understanding:

The educational path of the course aims to acquire the theoretical fundamentals and the main applicative methodologies to support decisions in economic and managerial fields focusing on multiple criteria decision analysis and its applications related to the sustainable development and to the urban and territorial planning. In addition to the necessary theoretical notions, the course aims to transfer also appropriate professional competences, both to enhance the concepts dealt from an operational point of view and to complete the educational path. In such a way, the course will provide to students the necessary knowledge to apply the methods and the studied techniques in the best way in the business world. To reach these objectives, during the lessons, suitable equipments and didactic methodologies, such as multimedia tools, databases, spreadsheet, etc., will be used. The whole educational path of the course aims to put together different didactic methodologies to develop both the inductive capacity and the students' logic-deductive process. The understanding check is not focused only in the last part of the course, that is, during the final exam; during the whole educational path a deep and continuous check of the students' understanding and effective learning of the explained concepts will be done.

2. Applying knowledge and understanding:

Great attention is addressed to the operative activity of the future graduates, who have to cope the problems mentioned above, often in different cross-the-board and interdisciplinary contexts. To this aim, a didactic methodology addressed to the understanding of the conceptual and analytical tools presented during the lessons will be used. It will aspire to the development of a critical ability of the student versus the treated concepts also presenting during the lessons real world cases that have been dealt by using the explained methodologies.

3. Making judgements:

The development of an independent critical ability in the context of the treated arguments is one of the main educational objectives of the course. A good acquisition of the theoretical knowledge and of the operative abilities planned in the syllabus of the course is not sufficient for a complete education of the student if this preparation is not associated with the acquisition of a deep ability to evaluate, set up and solve a problem suggesting adequate methods and techniques. This awareness is a guide for the professors during the whole educational path, making them interact with the students in a constructive logic, to stimulate their ability of reflecting, acquiring and interpreting the necessary information and the essential data to set up, analyze, and solve the coped problem. Therefore, during the course, students will be taught how to search for appropriate informative sources (scientific publications, databases, websites, etc.) looking at their reliability. During the lessons some real world case studies will be presented from experts in the territorial planning field and in the multiple criteria decision analysis field.

4. Communication skills:

Students will be prepared for explaining to stakeholders (not necessarily specialists in the field) projects and operative proposals regarding the problems coped during their work activity using an adequate technical language and motivating the use of the suggested methodologies. Indeed, it is not enough being able to apply correct methods and techniques that represent in a good way the considered problem; it is necessary to be able to justify the development and the validity of the performed analysis. To this aim, in addition to an adequate theoretical knowledge of the presented methods and of their operative implementation, it is necessary to learn how to use computational tools and multimedia technologies. The whole educational path will pay attention to develop such abilities ensuring the active participation of each student by means of appropriate didactic activities. Students are encouraged to express their thought by means of adequate reasoning and techniques, to write documents, to make presentations, to discuss what has been taught during the lessons to stimulate a productive interaction also from the comunicative point of view.

5. Learning skills:

From the beginning of the lessons, students will be provided with suggestions and incitements to participate to the whole educational path in an active way, to improve their individual way of studying and to learn in a more efficient way the concepts presented during the course. As already said above, the check of the effective aquisition of the teoretical and operative knowkedge is performed during the whole educational path and not only during the final exam. During the lessons, it will be verified if the knowledge has been efficiently transmitted reviewing, eventually, the way concepts are presented in class.

The course will be done by means of lectures in which, in addition to the theoretical aspects, great space will be devoted to the applications so that students will acquire a full comprehension of all concepts treated in class.

1^st MODULE

Number of credits: 3 CFU. Title of the module: Introduction to the course, preferences and basic concepts for investments' evaluation.

Program description: Basic concepts about the territorial planning and practical examples; binary relations; preference structures; expected value; actual value; internal rate of return.

2^nd MODULE

Number of credits: 3 CFU. Title of the module: Multiple criteria decision analysis: aggregation methods.

Program description: Structure of a multiple criteria decision analysis problem: alternatives, criteria, preference direction, problematiques (choice, ranking, sorting); discrete and continuous problems; dominance; Multiple Attribute Value Theory; additive utility; weighted sum; Analytic Hierarchy Process; Choquet integral; ELECTRE methods (ELECTRE IS, ELECTRE II, ELECTRE III, ELECTRE Tri); PROMETHEE methods (PROMETHEE I e II); methods based on decision rules. Difference between cost-benefit analysis and multiple criteria decision analysis.

3^rd MODULE

Number of credits: 3 CFU. Title of the module: Multiple criteira decision analysis: indirect technique and case studies

Program description: Distincion between direct and indirect inference of parameters; tradeoffs and importance of criteria; SMART; SWING; SRF; UTA; Robust Ordinal Regression; Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis; multiobjective optimization; introduction to MATLAB; implementation of multiple criteria decision analysis methods; presentation of real world case studies regarding the territorial planning and dealt by using concepts presented during the course.

Lecture notes provided from the professor and slides presented during the course

Figueira, Greco, Ehrgott (2005). Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis: State of the Art Surveys. Springer, Berlin

Nijkamp, Rietveld & Voogd (1990). Multicriteria evaluation in physical planning. North Holland, New York