Interactive Location Decisions: an airport example Date: 26 March 2015 7:00pm Venue: KKLG109, LG/F, K.K. Leung Building, HKU Organizers: Master of Arts in Transport Policy and Planning Programme, HKU Institute of Transport Studies, HKU Abstract: Using multi-criteria decision making, this talk offers a case study of airport location to illustrate how this approach captures the complex negotiation between airport authorities and the public in siting a new airport. Importantly, decision analysis can offer implicit representation of a multi-attribute utility function without an explicit mathematical expression. Instead, the value of the airport is captured in a site-specific setting where the interests of the stakeholders are revealed through a town hall meeting. Assisted by the Frank-Wolfe optimization procedure, the process converges toward an agreed-upon airport site. Going beyond the immediate case study, a broader look at the insightful role of decision analysis in viewing classic facility-location problems is discussed, including medians and centers. The article ends with a projection of where the art and science of decision analysis are heading in facility siting. The seminar is based on an article that will appear in the International Encyclopedia of Geography, which is sponsored by the Association of American Geographers and will be published by Wiley. Speaker: Professor Yupo Chan University of Arkansas at Little Rock Yupo Chan received his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972. After almost three decades of postdoctoral experience in industry, universities and government, he became the Founding Chair of the Department of Systems Engineering at the Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 2000. Dr. Chan’s training and research focus on transportation systems, telecommunications, networks and combinatorial optimization, multi-criteria decision-making and spatial-temporal information. Dr. Chan has published numerous books and monographs, including Location Theory and Decision Analysis - 2nd Edition, Springer; Location, Transport, and Land-Use: Modeling Spatial-temporal Information, Springer; Data Engineering: Mining, information and Intelligence (co-editor with J. Talburt and T. Talley), Springer.