Group Analytic Hierarchy Process Sorting II Method: An Application to Evaluate the Economic Value of a Wine Region Landscape

Abstract

In the ongoing context of climate change, there is an increasing need to support decision-making processes in the domain of landscape planning and management. Suitable evaluation techniques are needed to take into account the interests of actors and stakeholders in shared policy decisions. An important methodological contribution to the field is given by the Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), due to its ability to combine multiple aspects of a decision problem with the values and opinions expressed by different Decision Makers. The present paper develops the “Group Analytic Hierarchy Process Sorting II method” (GAHPSort II), which aims to sort a group of municipalities included in the UNESCO site “Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero, and Monferrato” (Italy) according to the economic attractiveness of the landscape. Extending the previous versions AHPSort I, AHPSort II and GAHPSort, the GAHPSort II optimizes multi-stakeholder evaluations on large databases by reducing the number of comparisons. Moreover, the GAHPSort II method is proposed as a novel spatial decision support system because it combines a set of economic indicators for landscape and GIS methods for aiding the Decision Makers to better understand the case study and to support the definition and localization of policies and strategies of landscape planning and management.

Environmental Sustainability in Vineyards under a Protected Designation of Origin in View of the Implementation of Photovoltaic Solar Energy Plants

“…The relationship between humans and nature materializes landscapes [3]. This is why, within the context of climate change and, given the difficulty of harmonizing development, conservation in fragile environments, and reconciling nature conservation with socioeconomic development [4], correct political decision-making around landscape planning and management is necessary, considering the interests of all parties involved [5].…”

ARASsort: A new sorting based multiple attribute decision‐making algorithm

“…All methods have their own assumption, characteristics, paradigm, and perspective. Outranking methods such as PROMSORT (Araz & Ozkarahan, 2005) and Flowsort (Nemery & Lamboray, 2008) which are based on PROMETHEE, require that the decision‐maker defines preference functions for each attribute and also indifference and preference thresholds. Distance‐based approaches which are extensions of compensatory methods such as TOPSISsort (de Lima Silva et al, 2020; De Lima Silva & de Almeida Filho, 2020; Ocampo et al, 2021; Sabokbar et al, 2016; Yamagishi & Ocampo, 2022) and VIKORsort (Demir et al, 2018; Ocampo & Yamagishi, 2021; Polat et al, 2021; Sabbagh et al, 2021) need to determine positive and negative ideal solutions and measure the distance between each alternative and these ideals. Pairwise comparison‐based approaches relying on subjective judgments of the decision‐makers, need to build a hierarchy showing the relations between attributes and/or alternatives and too many survey questions should be answered by the experts, such as AHPsort (Ishizaka et al, 2012; Toledo et al, 2019), AHPsort II (Labella et al, 2020; Miccoli & Ishizaka, 2017; Xie et al, 2019), some fuzzy AHP sorting methods (Du et al, 2021; Ishizaka et al, 2020; Krejci & Ishizaka, 2018; Xu et al, 2019), and group AHPsort (Assumma et al, 2021; Labella et al, 2021; Lopez & Ishizaka, 2017). …”

“…• Pairwise comparison-based approaches relying on subjective judgments of the decision-makers, need to build a hierarchy showing the relations between attributes and/or alternatives and too many survey questions should be answered by the experts, such as AHPsort (Ishizaka et al, 2012;Toledo et al, 2019), AHPsort II (Labella et al, 2020;Miccoli & Ishizaka, 2017;Xie et al, 2019), some fuzzy AHP sorting methods (Du et al, 2021;Ishizaka et al, 2020;Krejci & Ishizaka, 2018;Xu et al, 2019), and group AHPsort (Assumma et al, 2021;Labella et al, 2021;Lopez & Ishizaka, 2017).…”