Design of Multi-Criteria Spatial Decision Support System (MC-SDSS) for Animal Production

Received Dec 11, 2012 Revised Feb 10, 2013 Accepted Feb 16,2013 This paper presents a Multi-criteria spatial decision support system (MCSDSS) as a tool for decision making and planning. MC-SDSS can be used to assess different criteria with different weights. We believe that such tool can be utilized to help policy/decision makers to improve animal production in Egypt. MC-SDSS facilitates the integration of the exploration and evaluation phases of the decision-making process in a transparent and interactive system that allows policy/decision makers to carry out the analyses without advanced geographical information system (GIS) or multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) training. We use weighted overlay method to support data spatial analysis, and then visualize and analyze different factors such as "Diseases", "Climate", "Veterinary care" and "Economical factors" which affect the animal production in Egypt. The proposed tool policy/decision makers can change their weights and parameters according to their different study areas. Moreover they can use final suitability maps from this tool. Keyword: