DecisionMaps is a powerful decision support tool for business siting, enabling users to individually weight a variety of criteria such as demographic characteristics, proximity to assets, and special tax zones, combining them to identify locations best meeting business requirements.

Client: City of Philadelphia - Neighborhood Transformation Initiative

Challenge:  The primary objective of Philadelphia’s Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI) is the revitalization of neighborhoods through residential housing and business development.  Business siting, however, is a complex process, with different types of businesses having different needs.  NTI approached Avencia to create a tool that would help a wide array of businesses find their ideal locations based on a range of geographic factors.

Solution:  Avencia developed DecisionMaps, an innovative web-based tool that integrates critical spatial factors—such as demographic characteristics including age and educational level of residents, proximity to different kinds of assets such as public transportation routes or highways, or special tax zones—with property information. The tool allows a user to define both a set of criteria such as proximity to SEPTA subway stops, percentage of population with a college degree or enterprise zone status, and the priority weighting for each of the criteria, noting which factors are preferable and which are to be avoided. From the weighted criteria, the system generates a custom hot spot map highlighting areas that best match the user preferences. Selection of an area by the user presents a variety of aggregate and location specific data including demographics, zoning information, recent sales, and property status (vacant, city owned). Users can save both the search criteria and resulting maps in the system for later use.

Outcomes:  DecisionMaps is a powerful tool, enabling users to define their own weighted criteria and identify locations best meeting their search parameters.  DecisionMaps won ESRI’s 2006 award for Special Achievement in GIS and can be customized for use by many additional City departments to streamline and prioritize their projects.  For example, it may be used by the Department of Licenses and Inspections to prioritize areas with high concentrations of dangerous buildings or by the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative to allocate different types of City services to commercial corridors based on the conditions around each one. The DecisionMaps application served as a prototype for Avencia’s DecisionTree product, which can be easily adapted for any organization’s location-based decision support needs.

Publications:
Government Matters
ESRI Case Study
ESRI Special Achievement in GIS Award