Multi Criteria Evaluation

Multi Criteria Evaluation (MCE) in GIS is to investigate the allocation of land to suit a speciﬁc purpose based on a variety of attributes that the selected areas have. MCE makes it possible to generate compromise alternatives and rankings of alternatives according to their attractiveness.

There are two common procedures for MCE. The first involves Boolean overlay. All criteria are evaluated by thresholds of suitability to produce Boolean maps, which are then combined by logical operators such as intersection (AND) and union (OR). The second is  weighted linear combination. When there are more than one attributes that need to be considered to find the most suitable location, each of them are assigned a weight based on its importance. The results are multi-attribute spatial features with final scores. The higher the score, the more suitable the area.

GIS&T Body of Knowledge Concepts
Multi-criteria evaluation is covered in section AM5-7 of the 2006 GIS&T Body of Knowledge.