Alexander Patronidis

City planners, and government officials alike are faced with the sophisticated decision of choosing locations of a new facility subject to multiple conflicting criteria. These individuals are responsible for making crucial-policy decisions to ensure its communities are well served by a communities public services. Site selection in any application area is often very complicated and is specific to a surrounding community. Traditional site selection techniques fail to provide the ability to incorporate various aspects of a surrounding community, and therefore are ineffective at establishing a desired location in an optimal site. Multi-criteria evaluation and decision making approaches are now suggested as an effective, and efficient means of improve precision in the decision making process and reducing any side effects. This paper displays the process and results of a hospital site selection within the Windsor-Essex County, Ontario using a Multi-Criteria Evaluation Approach (MCE) which combines the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP). The paper presents three proposed site locations within the study area based on series of pre-defined criteria. Moreover, it presents the effectiveness of MCE in the site selection process, and can provide clearer avenues to social and health policy planners in order to provide effective healthcare service provisions across many rural and urban communities worldwide.