Decision Support Solution for Improved Investment Strategies in Philadelphia

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CLIENT: City of Philadelphia Department of Public Property
LOCATION: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“We were looking for a way to guide our decision-making process for capital projects. The GIS-based decision support tool developed by GeoDecisions makes it simple and extremely quick to factor in millions of data points and guide investment choice. Hany Hassaballa and his team are easy to work with and know not just how a tool should work, but how it should look and feel for ease of understanding and use.”
— Richard D. Quodomine, Senior Lead GIS Analyst, Department of Public Property, City of Philadelphia

CHALLENGE

The City of Philadelphia Department of Public Property (DPP) needed a better way to allocate limited investment funds to effectively support the needs of the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) and the Philadelphia Fire Department (PFD). All of the more than 100 facilities have needs, but DPP needed help prioritizing which of those were the most urgent based on multiple factors.

SOLUTION

Using geographic principles, such as multivariate and hotspot analyses, GeoDecisions created a market criteria decision support model for DPP based on statistically significant factors contributing to the demand for police and fire services. Building conditions, site assessment, market value, population, and service demand are the available criteria upon which city officials can make investment decisions. If they wish to determine which facilities need improving, they can break down each of the criteria by a weighted percent or give 100% of the weight to only one factor. The resulting application allows stakeholder groups to define and test planning scenarios determining the optimal facilities investment strategies.

One of the more challenging parts of this project required the application of predictive analytics to allow the city to forecast service demand in 2025, 2030, and 2035. This would help them determine future investment needs. The GeoDecisions team had to perform a regression analysis to determine which factors could cause the service demand to increase. Key to these calculations were Esri’s Exploratory Regression, Ordinary Least Square, and Geographically Weighted Regression tools from the Esri’s ArcGIS toolbox. These tools were used to determine the five statistically significant variables for future fire calls and police calls and formulated the equation to link these independent variables.

KEY TECHNOLOGY

  • Esri ArcGIS Desktop (Regression Analysis)

  • Esri ArcGIS Online (Webmaps & hosted feature services)

  • Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS (Developer Edition)

  • JavaScript API 3.23

  • WebStorm JavaScript IDE