A METHOD FOR STRATEGIC DECISION MAKING IN A WATERSHED -GAME THEORY

Rapid growth of urban areas and their development problems in industrializing countries has had major impacts on the environment. Water, the main source of life on earth is under the threat of various types of pollution. These threats have been forceful in demonstrating the necessity of the management and planning of drainage basins. The importance of the evaluation of the total economic value of the water resources and aquatic ecosystems of drainage basins has not yet been accepted in the current planning system of Turkey. In Turkey a total number of 36 public agencies take part in the decision making process within a drainage basin. Decisions taken by these agencies with respect to the use of land and water affect the quality and sustainability of water as a natural resource. These agencies act under a legal structure comprising 105 different laws and regulations related to the environment and this creates additional confusion in planning practice. The situation calls for the organization of special drainage management institutions for drainage basins. The aim of this study is to explore the use of game theory to analyze the roles and actions of different interest groups (players) and develop a better understanding of the decision making process and its consequences on a drainage basin. In this study, we use the case of a river sub-basin from the north-western region of Turkey: the Nilüfer Watershed that contains fertile agricultural lands and the third biggest industrial city in Turkey. The Nilüfer Stream is deeply polluted by industrial, agricultural and domestic wastewater. There are 1 metropolitan municipality, 20 district municipalities and 8 provincial authorities of central government within the watershed. All players have strategies about environment and planning such as land use decision, waste water standard and discharge permitting etc. Some strategies conflict the other players’ strategies. Game theory, which aims to explain the interactive decision making process with more than one decision maker, has developed as a theory of human strategic behavior based on an idealized picture of rational decision making (Binmore, 1996; Eichberger, 1992). The game theory has been applied to social sciences especially to economy, international relations, politics, which are in the state of making decisions in non-cooperative conditions. Although there is limited in number the game theory applications in planning, they are very important studies on location problem in spatial planning such as Stevens, (1961), Isard and Reiner, (1962), Isard, (1967). There are also new studies that use the game theory in planning. Sharing problem of river as a natural resource is the main study area in planning (Dinar and Wolf, 1994; Kilot, 1994; Kucukmekmetoglu and Guldman, 2002; Rogers, 1993). Game theory applications on environmental problems started in 1990s. Environmental problems such as transfrontier pollution (air or water) are often multilateral, and they affect all the agents in the economies of countries. There are studies in which air pollution problem is analyzed by the game theory with the cooperation of neighbor countries such as Ray (2000), Maler and Zeeuw (1998), Barret (1998). In this research an in depth analysis is made to understand the preferences and attitudes of different players taking part within the Nilüfer watershed. Players generally make independent decisions without any form of cooperation situation. Therefore, non-cooperative game is used in this analyze. The decision making process of the players are analyzed through a scenario in two-player games. The scenario is about strategies of environmental protection and industrial development in the watershed. We explore Nash equilibrium in game which represents present condition. Nash (1950) proved the existence of a strategic equilibrium for non-cooperative games. The main outcome of the paper will be to point to new directions in the planning process and to open to discussion the use of game theory in planning. Game theoretic approach will make it easier for the agents to cooperate if the conflicts in the planned area are clearly defined. It is possible to achieve cooperative bargaining solutions where all agents are winners. Actually, this is the target of planning because sustainable development of the river basin depends on bargaining where all agents are winners.

Spatial optimization for land use allocation: accounting for sustainability concerns

Land-use allocation has long been an important area of research in regional science. Land-use patterns are fundamental to the functions of the biosphere, creating interactions that have substantial impacts on the environment. The spatial arrangement of land uses therefore has implications for activity and travel within a region. Balancing development, economic growth, social interaction, and the protection of the natural environment is at the heart of long-term sustainability. Since land-use patterns are spatially explicit in nature, planning and management necessarily must integrate geographical information system and spatial optimization in meaningful ways if efficiency goals and objectives are to be achieved. This article reviews spatial optimization approaches that have been relied upon to support land-use planning. Characteristics of sustainable land use, particularly compactness, contiguity, and compatibility, are discussed and how spatial optimization techniques have addressed these characteristics are detailed. In particular, objectives and constraints in spatial optimization approaches are examined

Designing Sugaropolis:digital games as a medium for conveying transnational narratives

In this paper, the authors present a case study of ‘Sugaropolis’: a two-year practice-based project that involved interdisciplinary co-design and stakeholder evaluation of two digital game prototypes. Drawing on the diverse expertise of the research team (game design and development, human geography, and transnational narratives), the paper aims to contribute to debates about the use of digital games as a medium for representing the past. With an emphasis on design-as-research, we consider how digital games can be (co-)designed to communicate complex histories and geographies in which people, objects, and resources are connected through space and time

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio

Computational Intelligence Inspired Data Delivery for Vehicle-to-Roadside Communications

We propose a vehicle-to-roadside communication protocol based on distributed clustering where a coalitional game approach is used to stimulate the vehicles to join a cluster, and a fuzzy logic algorithm is employed to generate stable clusters by considering multiple metrics of vehicle velocity, moving pattern, and signal qualities between vehicles. A reinforcement learning algorithm with game theory based reward allocation is employed to guide each vehicle to select the route that can maximize the whole network performance. The protocol is integrated with a multi-hop data delivery virtualization scheme that works on the top of the transport layer and provides high performance for multi-hop end-to-end data transmissions. We conduct realistic computer simulations to show the performance advantage of the protocol over other approaches