The research described in this report was one of the building blocks of a project on Expert Systems for Integrated Development: A Case Study of Shanxi Province, a collaboration between IIASA’s Advanced Computer Applications (ACA) group and the State Science and Technology Commission of the People’s Republic of China. REPLACE is one of the true ‘expert systems’ components of the Shanxi Province prototype; not only was it implemented in Prolog, which made it attractive to the ACA project and its Chinese colleagues, it also represents, with a considerable amount of hindsight, an extension to the decision support philosophy of ‘satisficing’, cultivated at IIASA’s Methods and Decision Analysis (MDA) project. Combining a soft optimization paradigm with Prolog’s power to use numerical, as well as symbolic, descriptors in describing a location’s properties as well as an activity’s requirements, and matching them, using logic rather than number crunching, resulted in a system of considerable appeal and great promise. Adding the graphical interaction and display features that are the hallmark of ACA’s developments resulted in a package that impressively illustrates the underlying concepts and ideas in computational geography and locational analysis.
