A support system for delineating location choice sets of a firm seeking office space

Traffic, accessibility, employment location conditions, economic prospects, land-use policies are factors influencing the location decisions of office firms. As a multidimensional decision making process, tools for supporting real-estate managers and planners in such decisions may be useful. The objective of this study is to develop a GIS-based tool to support firms seeking office accommodation within a given regional or national study area. The tool relies on a matching approach, in which a firm’s characteristics (demand), on the one hand, and environmental conditions and office spaces on offer (supply), on the other, are analyzed separately in a first step. Subsequently, a match is sought. That is, a suitability score is obtained for every firm and office space on offer by applying some value judgment (satisfaction, utility etc.). Focusing on location aspects, expert knowledge about location decisions of firms/organizations regarding office accommodation, acquired from a group of real-estate advisers and stored in decision tables, constitutes the core of the model. Apart from the delineation of location choice sets for a firm seeking a location, the tool supports two additional types of queries. First, the agent supports the more generic problem of an optimal allocation of firms to a set of vacant locations. Second, the tool allows users to find firms that meet the characteristics of a given location. As a GIS-based tool, the results can be visualized using GIS features such as thematic maps and overlay techniques, allowing several types of analyses.