Geo-Office: a geo-informatics tool for supporting the planning of office development

The objective of this work was to develop a GIS-based decision support tool to help (urban) planners and decision makers regarding site selection for the office sector. Expert knowledge about location decisions of firms/organizations regarding office accommodation stored in decision tables constitutes the core of the model. Based on this information, a computational tool using several geographic databases was developed. The results obtained from some illustrative cases shows that the tool displays plausible behavior when tested within distinct scenarios. The results also highlight the flexibility of the tool that is due to the modular approach adopted. Applications suggested for this tool are potentially very useful, as those features allow inclusion of domain knowledge and contain a set of concepts and mechanisms to support and simulate location decisions.