Combining spatial analysis with MCDA for the siting of healthcare facilities

Site selection of healthcare facilities is a typical ill-structured decision problem since it involves multiple criteria and sometimes conflicting stakeholders. Nowadays the site selection problem is ignored by most of the existing evaluation tools. Through a deep literature review the research proposes an evaluation system divided into four criteria (Functional quality, Location quality, Environmental quality, Economical aspects), each in turn composed by sub-criteria supported by the methodology of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), with the aim of assessing the land suitability for new healthcare structures, in order to improve the transparency and robustness of the decision-making process. After that, spatial component has been added to MCDA using Geographic Information System (GIS). The Multi-Criteria-Spatial Decision Support Systems (MC-SDSS) allow to address choices by an integrated knowledge about territory and by the explicit consideration of the spatial dimension of decision problems. The case study selected to test this method is "La Città della Salute", in the city of Milan, Italy, a project aimed to answer to scientific and cultural changes of contemporary medicine. The focus of the research is to identify suitability maps able to verify the adequacy of the territory in an adaptive perspective, expanding the alternatives' domain.