A Semi-systematic Review of the Recent Advances on GIS-Based Multi-Criteria Decision Making for Spatial Suitability

Combining Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provides a substantial framework for spatial suitability analysis, which assesses locations based on environmental, economic, and social criteria. The aim of the study is to highlight the research advances in this field, and to detect the most usable methods in each subject area. We followed a semi-systematic review approach, combining bibliometric analysis of 486 articles with a manual content analysis of a stratified sample of 150 studies. The bibliometric analysis was performed on three major terms: “MCDM”, "Suitability", and “GIS”, from 2000 to 2024. The obtained results reveal that The Most used method is the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Finally, the study provides field-specific methodological frameworks highlighting the most commonly adopted approaches in the literature to serve as a reference for future studies.