ADAPT: A Knowledge-Based Decision Support System for Producing Zoning Schemes

Few computer programs have been devised to assist local government planners draw up zoning schemes, despite the ubiquity of zoning schemes for expressing land-use plans. When one program, LUPLAN, representative of a broader class of plan-evaluation programs, was used to produce a zoning scheme, it was found to be fundamentally unsuited to what is essentially a political task. Perhaps the major difficulty lay in the reduction in LUPLAN of what is a highly complex decisionmaking task to a series of numerical manipulations. The ADAPT program, which has been specifically designed to overcome this and other problems, leaves most of the decisionmaking to the planner, but assists by providing relevant knowledge and data about each conflict — choice situation as it arises, and by keeping a record of decisions made and their underlying reasons. The reasons for the development of ADAPT are reminiscent of those that have led to the recent development of decision support systems (DSSs) for organizational management purposes, and many of the techniques used by ADAPT are similar to those used in knowledge-based systems. DSSs and knowledge-based systems are both described in some detail since they form a basis on which ADAPT, and similar decision-aiding programs, can be further developed.