Application of Scenario Forecasting Methods and Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Modeling in Substantiation of Urban Area Development Strategies

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article is devoted to developing an approach to analyzing strategies for developing territories based on the methods of fuzzy cognitive modeling and fuzzy optimization.

Despite the satisfactory quality of the article, some shortcomings need to be corrected.

1. The abstract should be rewritten, including the main goals, methods, and findings description. The numerical results should be included.
2. The statement “The most complete review of research related to the analysis of approaches to the use and transformation of built-up areas is given in the work of R. Mason [1].” is wrong. Reference 1 has other authorship, and it was published in 2007.
3. References 2-9 are insufficient and does not represent the modern state of research. 
4. The methods section lacks scientific novelty and is based on known concepts. The authors’ contribution should be defined.
5. Figure 2 does not have any sense because it is impossible to interpret.
6. Table 3 should be reorganized. Now the city description lies in both columns.
7. Figure 6 should be increased.
8. Figures 7-12 should be presented as graphs and described in detail in the text.
9. The Discussion section should be rewritten. It should compare obtained results and findings of the research with other research in a given area.
10. The scientific and practical novelty of the research should be highlighted.
11. The authors use inappropriate self-citation, which is 20% of all sources.

In summarizing my comments, I think the manuscript could not be published in such a form, and the content does not fit the journal’s scope.

Author Response

The article is devoted to developing an approach to analyzing strategies for developing territories based on the methods of fuzzy cognitive modeling and fuzzy optimization.

Despite the satisfactory quality of the article, some shortcomings need to be corrected.

The authors thank the reviewer for their time and detailed analysis of the presented study. The specificity and point-by-point marking of comments is extremely valuable. This allowed us to really improve the presentation of the study. All required corrections and improvements are included in the text and highlighted with a yellow marker. We also provide detailed explanations of the changes made to each point of the comments here below.

1. The abstract should be rewritten, including the main goals, methods, and findings description. The numerical results should be included.

The abstract has been rewritten. And the purpose of the study, a brief description of the proposed approach and the contribution of the article are added in accordance with the comments. Numerical results were not included due to limitations on the size of the abstract, but are presented in Section 3.

2. The statement “The most complete review of research related to the analysis of approaches to the use and transformation of built-up areas is given in the work of R. Mason [1].” is wrong. Reference 1 has other authorship, and it was published in 2007.

Indeed, an error was made in the numbering of references. Necessary corrections were made in the review part of the article and References.

3. References 2-9 are insufficient and does not represent the modern state of research.

The analysis of modern state of research presented in the first version of the article was insufficient. We paid special attention to this aspect and significantly expanded the analysis by presenting its results in the Introduction section. In addition, a corresponding comparison has been made in the Discussion section. Description of all considered sources added to References.

4. The methods section lacks scientific novelty and is based on known concepts. The authors’ contribution should be defined.

The methods section has been almost completely rewritten. Its individual subparagraphs explicitly indicate the proposed structure and the novelty of the proposed approach.

5. Figure 2 does not have any sense because it is impossible to interpret.

A detailed description of the procedure for constructing a cognitive map, shown in Figure 2, is given in a special paragraph of the 2nd section. It is shown how the factors and relations between them are interpreted (vertices and edges of the graph).

6. Table 3 should be reorganized. Now the city description lies in both columns.

Thanks for pointing out the table formatting violation. The description "Index" and "Description" for this item has been clarified.

7. Figure 6 should be increased.

The picture was a screenshot from the Mental Modeler program. Improving the quality of the screenshot did not give satisfactory results. We have redrawn the matrix for a better representation of the values indicated in it.

8. Figures 7-12 should be presented as graphs and described in detail in the text.

The information presented in Figures 7-12 has been converted into graphs. Changes to the comments of the figures are made in Section 3.

9. The Discussion section should be rewritten. It should compare obtained results and findings of the research with other research in a given area.

The Discussion section has been separated. A comparison of the proposed approach with existing ones has been added to the text of the section.

10. The scientific and practical novelty of the research should be highlighted.

The necessary explanatory wording about the novelty of the study was added to the text of the introduction and description of the methods.

11. The authors use inappropriate self-citation, which is 20% of all sources.

Thank you for pointing out this incorrect self-citation. This comment has been corrected due to a significant increase in the number of references to third-party studies when writing an extended version of the State-Of-The-Art review.

12. In summarizing my comments, I think the manuscript could not be published in such a form, and the content does not fit the journal’s scope.

The authors are very closely connected with the applied aspects of the work and the application of theoretical approaches in the practice of decision support in the implementation of urban development projects. In view of this, quite a lot of attention was paid to the results of using fuzzy cognitive modeling and fuzzy optimization in the first version of the material. We understand this and fully agree with your comment about the relevance of our article to the scope of the journal. Therefore, we shifted the focus in order to demonstrate the theoretical significance of this study for the information technology industry in terms of the Special Issue “New Applications in Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis” in the revised material.

We want to express special thanks to the reviewer for pointing out the language errors. The text of the article was completely edited with the participation of a native speaker.

Regards,

the team of authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for inviting me as a reviewer for the paper titled Application of Scenario Forecasting Methods and Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Modeling in Substantiation of Urban Area Development Strategies. The paper deals with decision support in the explanation of strategies for the development of urban areas. The authors need to consider the following major points as a limitation or further scope for refining the paper:

1) The abstract is not as informative as expected. A standard abstract must present, without leaving any doubt, the objective of the paper precisely; the source of data and analytical approach used; key findings, and any policy implications and recommendations.

2) The text from lines 71 to 80 should be at the end of the Introduction section.

3) Add a new section: Literature analysis.

3) Literature analysis should be of better quality. The literature mentioned in the introduction should be analyzed in more detail. Also, expand the literature review with new sources (period 2021-2023).

5) Based on literature analysis author should better highlight the objective of their paper and to what extent it contributes to close a gap in the existing literature and/or practice. What is the innovative value of the contribution proposed by the authors? This is an essential part of the literature analysis section.

6) On lines 203, 205, 208, and 210, the authors use the term “Principle” (from 1 to 4). I suggest using "Step” (from 1 to 4).

7) From line 237 to line 245, the authors defined the criteria. Describe the criteria in more detail: how it affects the output values of the model; whether they are numerical or linguistic; if they are numerically displayed, the unit of measure; if they are linguistically displayed, the linguistic scale used for these criteria; what the type of criteria - cost or benefit.

8) Figure 1 should be shown in more detail. In general, sections that follow after Figure 1 should follow the algorithm in Figure 1. Fix the resolution in Figure 1.

9) Figures 6-12 should be slightly enlarged or fix the resolution or organized the figure differently. Some parts of the text on the figures cannot be read.

10) The authors need to provide several solid future research directions clearly.

Please, mark the requested changes, in the corrected version, in a different color.

Author Response

Thank you for inviting me as a reviewer for the paper titled Application of Scenario Forecasting Methods and Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Modeling in Substantiation of Urban Area Development Strategies. The paper deals with decision support in the explanation of strategies for the development of urban areas. The authors need to consider the following major points as a limitation or further scope for refining the paper:

We thank the reviewer for their attention to our study and for taking the time to analyze it in detail and form a detailed list of comments. The suggested corrections and recommendations for improvement were very valuable in improving the presentation of the article. All corrections are made to the new version of the article. Here we have included separate comments on each item to clarify any corrections made.

1) The abstract is not as informative as expected. A standard abstract must present, without leaving any doubt, the objective of the paper precisely; the source of data and analytical approach used; key findings, and any policy implications and recommendations.

A detailed description of the methods used and the results is included in the abstract. The purpose of the work is clearly stated.

2) The text from lines 71 to 80 should be at the end of the Introduction section.

This is an absolutely correct remark. The paragraph describing the structure of the text has been edited in accordance with the changes made to the article and moved to the end of the Introduction section.

3) Add a new section: Literature analysis.

According to the requirements for the structure of materials in the journal Information (“Research Manuscript Sections” here https://www.mdpi.com/journal/information/instructions#:~:text=the%20subject%20discipline.-,Research%20Manuscript%20Sections,-Introduction%3A%20The) there is no provision for a separate section under “Literature analysis”. However, based on your next comment, we conducted additional analysis of State-Of-The-Art sources and, in accordance with the requirements of the journal, expanded the description of the analysis in the Introduction section.

4) Literature analysis should be of better quality. The literature mentioned in the introduction should be analyzed in more detail. Also, expand the literature review with new sources (period 2021-2023).

We thank the reviewer for a very important remark. Special attention was paid to additional analysis and description of the current state of research. Both the newest sources and classical ones, containing a qualitative analysis of previous periods, were considered. The results are detailed in the Introduction section. Some points reflecting the characteristics of the results obtained are presented in the Discussion section. Links to all considered sources are added to References.

5) Based on literature analysis author should better highlight the objective of their paper and to what extent it contributes to close a gap in the existing literature and/or practice. What is the innovative value of the contribution proposed by the authors? This is an essential part of the literature analysis section.

An additional analysis of recent studies made it possible to more clearly formulate the purpose of the work and its contribution. The introduction section, which includes the State-Of-The-Art review, as well as the methods and discussion section, have been almost completely rewritten to better present the results and their novelty.

6) On lines 203, 205, 208, and 210, the authors use the term “Principle” (from 1 to 4). I suggest using "Step” (from 1 to 4).

We understand why the reviewer suggested not using the term “Principle”. But at the same time, we believe that the use of the term "Step" is not very appropriate, because it will form an excessive perception of this list as a sequence. Therefore, we eliminated the use of "Principle" and formatted the items as an unordered list.

7) From line 237 to line 245, the authors defined the criteria. Describe the criteria in more detail: how it affects the output values of the model; whether they are numerical or linguistic; if they are numerically displayed, the unit of measure; if they are linguistically displayed, the linguistic scale used for these criteria; what the type of criteria - cost or benefit.

These criteria are represented by linguistic variables. Appropriate explanations are made in the text, and an example of a description is given.

8) Figure 1 should be shown in more detail. In general, sections that follow after Figure 1 should follow the algorithm in Figure 1. Fix the resolution in Figure 1.

The graphics and resolution of Figure 1 have been corrected. The structure of the algorithm also received minor changes. In this case, in fact, the entire section 2 was rewritten for a clear interpretation of the proposed algorithm. We thank the reviewer for a very valuable remark, which allowed us to significantly improve the presentation of the theoretical part of the study.

9) Figures 6-12 should be slightly enlarged or fix the resolution or organized the figure differently. Some parts of the text on the figures cannot be read.

All figures (6-12) have been redone. Figure 6 is made in the form of a matrix without unnecessary graphic elements. Figures 7-12 have been redistributed as bar graphs and summarized in one figure to facilitate cross-comparison of the results.

10) The authors need to provide several solid future research directions clearly.

Directions for future research are indicated in the conclusion.

11) Please, mark the requested changes, in the corrected version, in a different color.

We have highlighted all the changes made in the text with a yellow marker for the convenience of reviewing the updated version of the article.

Regards,

the team of authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The article considers an approach to the analysis of strategies for the areas development based on the methods of fuzzy cognitive modeling and fuzzy optimization. Criteria for evaluating area development projects were developed and models were built that can be used to compare alternative development scenarios and select control impacts for area development managing.

Some Recommendations to the paper:

1. Keywords should be abbreviated and arranged alphabetically.

2. In the Introduction section, authors should outline the contributions of the paper.

3. The organization of the paper should be given in the last paragraph of Introduction section. The objective and originality of the paper should be given in the introduction section.

4. Authors is necessary to indicate preferences for Factors that determine the urban areas development strategies of table 2.

5. The paper lacks a clear definition of the fuzzy sets proposed by Zadeh „Zadeh, L.: Fuzzy Sets. Information and Control 8 (3), 338-353 (1965)“.

6. At the end of the suggested approach, the authors are recommended include optimization of the multicriteria evaluation system for future evaluations by removing from it the slow and expensive criteria based on the established correlation dependencies between them as proposed in the papers

Traneva, V., Tranev, S. (2022). Intuitionistic Fuzzy Model for Franchisee Selection. In: Kahraman, C., Tolga, A.C., Cevik Onar, S., Cebi, S., Oztaysi, B., Sari, I.U. (eds) Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems. INFUS 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 504. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09173-5_73

Traneva, V., Tranev, S. (2022). Intuitionistic Fuzzy Approach for Outsourcing Provider Selection in a Refinery. In: Lirkov, I., Margenov, S. (eds) Large-Scale Scientific Computing. LSSC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13127. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97549-4_31

6. Authors is necessary to divide the Discussion and Conclusions section into two separate sections. In the Conclusion section, draw conclusions about the goals achieved and outline the future development of scientific research.

Author Response

The article considers an approach to the analysis of strategies for the areas development based on the methods of fuzzy cognitive modeling and fuzzy optimization. Criteria for evaluating area development projects were developed and models were built that can be used to compare alternative development scenarios and select control impacts for area development managing.

Some Recommendations to the paper:

The authors thank the reviewer for their attention to this study and for pointing out specific problem areas in the presentation. Following the proposed list of corrections has significantly improved the presentation of the work done and the results obtained. All edits made are highlighted in yellow in the article. The following is an explanation of the corrections made.

1. Keywords should be abbreviated and arranged alphabetically.

The list of keywords that we initially provided was consistent with the requirements of the journal (as indicated in the “Front Matter” section https://www.mdpi.com/journal/information/instructions#:~:text=the%20main%20conclusions.-,Keywords,-%3A%20Three%20to). However, we took into account the recommendation of the reviewer, shortened the list of keywords and arranged it in alphabetical order.

2. In the Introduction section, authors should outline the contributions of the paper.

An analysis of the shortcomings of existing approaches is added to the text of the article in the introduction. The article also shows the contribution of the article related to the improvement of the stage of structuring information about the problem under study.

3. The organization of the paper should be given in the last paragraph of Introduction section. The objective and originality of the paper should be given in the introduction section.

The purpose of the study is clearly indicated by the results of an extended analysis of current research in this area. The description of the structure of the article was edited according to the changes made, including the recommendations of the reviewer proposed below. The structure description paragraph has been moved to the end of the Introduction section.

4. Authors is necessary to indicate preferences for Factors that determine the urban areas development strategies of table 2.

The rationale for the choice of factors for constructing a cognitive model was given in the text. Factors determine the specifics of the territory as an object of management.

5. The paper lacks a clear definition of the fuzzy sets proposed by Zadeh „Zadeh, L.: Fuzzy Sets. Information and Control 8 (3), 338-353 (1965)“.

Definition text added to article with links to relevant sources.

6. At the end of the suggested approach, the authors are recommended include optimization of the multicriteria evaluation system for future evaluations by removing from it the slow and expensive criteria based on the established correlation dependencies between them as proposed in the papers

Traneva, V., Tranev, S. (2022). Intuitionistic Fuzzy Model for Franchisee Selection. In: Kahraman, C., Tolga, A.C., Cevik Onar, S., Cebi, S., Oztaysi, B., Sari, I.U. (eds) Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems. INFUS 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 504. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09173-5_73

Traneva, V., Tranev, S. (2022). Intuitionistic Fuzzy Approach for Outsourcing Provider Selection in a Refinery. In: Lirkov, I., Margenov, S. (eds) Large-Scale Scientific Computing. LSSC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13127. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97549-4_31

We thank the reviewer for the recommendation. The proposed sources were reviewed and added to the review and list of references.

7. Authors is necessary to divide the Discussion and Conclusions section into two separate sections. In the Conclusion section, draw conclusions about the goals achieved and outline the future development of scientific research.

We thank the reviewer for helpful comments and recommendations, which allowed us to significantly improve the presentation of the study. The last section has also been divided into Discussion and Conclusion as recommended. Both new sections have been edited and completed. The text with the conclusions and directions for further research is added to the Conclusion.

Regards,

the team of authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have addressed some of the reviewer’s comments. However, some of the shortcomings still need to be corrected.

1. The abstract still does not contain any numerical results obtained within the study.
2. The authors say that they have made a technical error with reference [1]. However, they deleted the sentence “The most complete review of research related to the analysis of approaches to the use and transformation of built-up areas is given in the work of R. Mason [1]” and included completely another aspect.
3. The current state of research provided by the authors is insufficient.
4. The Materials and Methods section has been rewritten. However, it still lacks novelty and is based on known concepts.
5. The Discussion section lacks references and comparisons with other research.
6. Self-citation is still inappropriate.

Reviewer 2 Report

All the reviewers' comments have been addressed carefully and sufficiently. The revisions are rational from my point of view. I think the current version of the paper can be accepted.

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors have implemented all recommendations made.