Developing a game-theoretic interactive decision-making framework for urban land-use planning

Abstract

Land-use changes are the result of individuals' interactive decisions and are directly affected by stakeholders' preferences. For a better understanding of land-use change processes and to support the development of an adequate land-use plan, simulating stakeholders' interactions is a key challenge. This study aims to develop a Game-Theoretic Interactive Decision Making (GTIDM) framework to simulate the interrelated behavior of stakeholders with imperfect information in a land-use change process. GTIDM considers consequences of the any possible decision taken by actors and support the best possible payoff for all decision-makers in conflicted and competitive situations. The proposed framework was implemented and analyzed using data from the 22nd municipal region of Tehran. We compared the results from GTIDM with Multi-Agent System (MAS) and Conventional Multi-Criteria Decision Making-based (CMCDM) frameworks to demonstrate the effects of considering or ignoring the interactive decision-making process. The results obtained indicate that the interactive decision-making situation can be efficiently simulated by GTIDM and the outputs are more similar to stakeholders’ decisions in the real world. The MAS- and CMCDM-based frameworks are less focused on interactive situations. Finally, GTIDM provides insight into interactive decision-making in land-use change process and can lead us toward a feasible solution in urban land-use planning.