Human beings are not very good at making decisions or planning. It is argued that a major reason for this lies in the essential logic that underlies decisionmaking discourse. Those with experience of decisionmaking will know that wild speculations and conflicting values confound the process,...

A new approach is introduced for evaluating strategies for the safe disposal of high-level nuclear waste. Five strategies are considered, and by means of the effective method of 'analytic hierarchy process' these strategies are prioritized with respect to a set of tangible and intangible...

Conventional multivariate statistical techniques are inhibiting in their analysis of structure. This paper introduces the 'language structure' or '<I>Q</I>-analysis' proposed by R H Atkin, and compares its results with widely adopted multivariate statistical techniques within the context of the...</i>

The utility of linear programming for land-use planning is firmly established. It allows realistic models of complex planning situations to be formulated and solved computationally. However, because many objectives are qualitative and conflicting and many of the constraints may not be clearly...

Philosophical and methodological issues in a theory of planning are discussed. It is suggested that a formal language which respects the world must be data directed, and an evaluation of various formal languages is presented.

In this paper, methods originally developed by Saaty for modelling the importance of attitudes concerning particular issues are applied to a set of attitudinal data associated with the views of a group of experts on the development of urban systems analysis and modelling. Saaty's model is first...

This paper explores the application of statistical pattern-recognition methods, discriminant analysis in particular, to the problems of classifying and of dating remains of Byzantine brick construction in Constantinople and Asia Minor. The technique is introduced and compared to other relevant...

This study deals with the development and application of a methodology which permits optimal planning of an urban streetlighting system. It presents for the first time -- to the best of the authors' knowledge -- a procedure for the quantitative estimation of the utility accruing from...