Multi-Criteria Spatial Decision Support System for Urban Energy Planning: An interdisciplinary integrated methodological approach

The present chapter provides an interdisciplinary integrated methodological framework. This framework guides to develop a multi-criteria spatial decision support system (MC-SDSS) to support decision-making processes in urban energy planning (UEP) purposes. The MC-SDSS helps in evaluation and visualization of the results of different UEP scenarios involving the relative stakeholders and decision-makers (DMs) from the early stage of planning. This will help in defining and evaluating energy-saving scenarios taking into account the participation of stakeholders in an interactive way. The meaning of integrating different tools and methods in this framework is due to their complementarity in fulfilling various tasks in the UIEP process. This fact can help to assess, over a short-/longterm period, the mix of measures by analysing meaningful scenarios focused on energy consumptions, environmental impacts and economic and social aspects. The result is the development of a new MC-SDSS, which is an interactive energetic plug-in in GIS environment using CommunityViz. This tool has been applied to a demonstrator case study, related to a medium-sized city of the metropolitan area of Turin. However, the methodology used for delivering the tool can be applied to other contexts due to its flexibility.