The work of Y-S Ho is placed in the context of design and planning theory. The significance of the Galois lattice methodology is stressed.

The success of physical sciences led the social scientists to adopt the 'mathematics' that accompanied the development of physical sciences to be the mode of their disciplines and they developed the habit of dressing up their rather imprecise concepts in the language of numbers and calculus....

Most assessments of the poor performance of regional planning agencies have focussed on the policy problems of putting development theory into practice. This paper looks instead at the institutional aspect. Abstracting from the diversity of policy contexts, it asks whether there are common...

A new paradigm involving evolution and change through the concept of dissipative structures has been developed in recent years in the physical sciences. This paradigm has profound implications for prediction, for design, and for models which purport to explain how complex systems develop. The...

In this paper an elementary exploration is given of some of the features of <I>Q</I>-discrimination analysis, an adaptation by Johnson of Atkin's <I>Q</I>-analysis for use in clustering work. The method is summarised. It is shown how the performance of the method varies considerably, depending upon whether...</i></i>

In this paper attention will be focussed on the development of a new multicriteria evaluation approach for mixed 'quantitative - qualitative' data. First a brief overview is given of the 'state of the art' of multicriteria evaluation in urban and regional planning. In addition, a mixed data...

A number of interchange heuristics are described for solving p-median location problems. The robustness of these algorithms is extensively evaluated in terms of optimality and mean percentage errors. The best of the proposed heuristics generated optimal solutions to 307 of 319 median problems...

Egress problems within buildings are evaluated with the theory and computational methods of analytical queuing network models. Floor layouts of buildings are modeled as hierarchical queuing networks. Overall exit times are estimated together with variation in occupant exit times during the...

The <I>Q</I>-analysis algorithm is sometimes used as a clustering procedure, sometimes inappropriately. The data for clustering a set of elements in terms of a set of descriptors are assumed to be weighted in a scale. This paper shows the scale requires no structure beyond an ordinal order relation to...</i>