توسعه گردشگری شهری پایدار با رویکرد تصمیم‌گیری چندمعیاره مکانی: ترکیب روش BWM و عملگر OWA در محیط GIS (مطالعه موردی: شهر اهر)

In recent years, urban tourism has become one of the main drivers of economic growth and quality-of-life improvement in medium-sized cities in Iran. However, the lack of spatially explicit and decision-oriented frameworks, along with reliance on intuitive judgments, has often led to fragmented interventions and reduced planning effectiveness. To address this gap, this study proposes an integrated framework for evaluating and locating suitable areas for sustainable urban tourism development in Ahar City. The framework is based on the integration of spatial multi-criteria decision-making in a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment, the Best–Worst Method (BWM), and Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) operators.



In the first step, influential indicators were identified within four main clusters: accessibility, attraction, physical quality, and risk. These indicators were then standardized using fuzzy membership functions. Next, based on the judgments of local experts, the relative weights of the criteria were estimated using the BWM method. The spatial layers were subsequently integrated under several decision-making scenarios, ranging from a conservative WLC approach to different OWA scenarios and reference fuzzy operators.



To validate the model, 230 positive points representing actual urban tourism destinations and 2,000 background points were extracted within the valid data extent. The performance of the scenarios was evaluated using Precision at different top-percentage levels of the suitability map and the area under the ROC curve (AUC). The results indicate that, within the weight vector, accessibility- and attraction-related components have the highest priority. However, in the single-criterion analysis, “distance to greenery” and “optimal distance to high-order roads” showed the greatest discriminatory power in explaining the spatial pattern of actual tourism destinations. The physical-quality cluster, including quality, façade, structural condition, and building age, also played an important role in locating tourism destinations.



Among the aggregation scenarios, the WLC operator exhibited conservative behavior and performed close to random discrimination. In contrast, the OWA scenario with beta parameter 5 provided the best balance between overall discriminatory ability, with an AUC of approximately 0.597, and the coverage of positive points within the top 20% of the map, with a Precision value of approximately 0.252 at this level. Although the Fuzzy OR operator captured about 85% of positive points in the upper class of the map, it produced a very broad zone that was less useful for targeted interventions and was therefore assessed as more suitable for initial opportunity screening.



Accordingly, the integrated BWM–OWA–GIS framework can serve as an effective decision-support tool for sustainable urban tourism development planning in Ahar. By highlighting the roles of accessible greenery, safe distance from main arteries, and the improvement of physical quality, this framework can meaningfully reduce the gap between spatial analysis and operational policymaking.