DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

It is probably unlikely that the City of Vancouver would ever entertain the idea of opening a Doggy Cafe. The Ministryof Health would likely not allow for dogs to be present inside a location where food is being prepared, nor would the City of Vancouver Bylaws Department or Public Transit be very supportive of the idea of having dogs running freely meeting each other at a cafe.

As fictional as this project is, it did utilize real data. The Factors and the way they were used were based on the fictional reponses of dogs, but there is still merit to viewing and analyzing the results. In addition, the methodology used within in this project can be applied to other criteria.

Data Collection

The major shortcoming of this project is that the data is very simple. Once the MCE had begun, it became evident that there were many factors that were better as distance decreased. The results would have been more interesting if more data not dependent on distance was collected, ie. Slope, weather, population, etc. This project did include enough factors to produce a reasonable result, however, it was heavily based on the distance between one feature to another. For example, in the future, it would be benefical to include traffic flow data and assign fricition values to the street data. It would be interesting to see how the location would change if traffic flow and ease of travel was integrated into the analysis. It also has become evident over the course of this project that many factors and constraints need to be used to produce a model that accurately reflects the real world. This project produced a very generalized answer to the original problem: To Find a Suitable Location for a Doggy Cafe in Vancouver City, BC Canada. In order for this locational analysis be used as a basis for making decisions, many more factors and constraints would need to be identified. In order to ensure they were correctly used, it would be necessary for the person conducting the analysis to travel within Vancouver and look at the Constraints and Variables in the real world and conduct interviews with those affected by them.

Spatial Analysis

The results of the Spatial Analysis were very interesting. It was very evident that there are areas suitable for the location based on the criteria used. What was more interesting to see how the areas most suitable were concentrated together in one area as the threshold values decreased.

Final Thoughts...

Overall this project gave me an introduction to how complex locational analysis is when using Multi-Critera Evaluation. Most of all it taught me invaluable skills that I can put into use next time I am invloved with a project like this. Because I have gone through the steps and seen the final results of my efforts, I bellieve I am now better equipted to take on a project like this in the future, and gain a more valueable result.

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