The purpose of this project was to prioritize a portfolio of over 8,000 properties for suitability to locate cellular transmission towers. To assure the objectivity and defensibility of the prioritization, we developed an internally consistent mathematical model using techniques of multi-attribute decision theory (Keeney, Ralph L. and Howard Raiffa, Decisions With Multiple Objectives. Cambridge University Press, 1993). The model was implemented in ArcView 3.0 software using commercially available digital maps of New Jersey.

We identified four classes of attributes relevant to site prioritization: environmental, regulatory, technical, and commercial. The environmental attributes describe esthetic and regulatory restrictions on site use. The regulatory attributes describe specific restrictions related to airport proximity and other zones. The technical attributes include the existence of tall buildings suitable for siting towers, land cover, and elevation. The commercial attributes include population density and traffic density along major highway and rail corridors.

Through guided questioning of expert engineers and consultants, we developed suitable methods to measure the attributes and mathematical score functions to combine them into numbers for site prioritization. Many attribute measurements require spatial analysis for calculation. For example, commercial suitability depends heavily on potential use of a hypothetical tower site. Use will depend on the total amount of highway "visible" from the site, on the traffic along the highway, on the population "visible" from the site, and on the demographics of that population. Thus, in addition to visibility calculations, one must also compute these traffic and demographic coverage factors. The GIS made these calculations possible and efficient.