Improving Intelligent Decision Making in Urban Planning: Using Machine Learning Algorithms

Problem Statement And Goals

Nowadays, the population, around the world is largely urban. More than half of them live in urban areas, so the growth of the population has accelerated, which has resulted in negative consequences, rather than positive ones: new aerated towns and cities are proliferating. In this case, public authorities should apply solutions.

As a bearer, facilitator and guarantor of the planning and implementation process, they are supposed to guarantee to minimize this development, which is carried out informally, as well as guarantee the continuance of the development by following an urban planning strategy.

Urban planning process ends up with an urban project that should be realized, and every urban project needs a hosting site. Hosting site choice represent the last phase in urban planning process before the realization take place. Specialists consider this phase as one of the most complex parts in the whole process. Several aspects in this phase may come in as decision factors: politics, socioeconomic, cultural, religious and other; especially, when we talk about taking account of civil society actors.

We choose the field choice problem (case study), which is a multi-sectoral problem that includes dozen of administrations in agriculture, town planning, public works, etc. The participating entities must give their opinions on the proposed site, where each of them has its constraints and easement. Each field has its own characteristics, such as the nature of land (agricultural, clayey...), underground installations (electricity cables, telephone cables, gas lines ...). The Planning group must decide which site will host the project from the proposals.

The obvious impediment of today‘s urban development is due to the weak decisions, and the citizens’ dissatisfaction of the realized projects. The citizens’ contentment represents one of the prerequisite principles of a sustainable development, which also remains a big problem.

Therefore, the group must make a decision that meets both decision makers’ objectives and the citizens’ objectives. Despite the fact that considerable attention has been paid to this domain, public authorities suffer from a fatal shortage in planning tools.