Evaluation of Resilience in Historic Urban Areas by Combining Multi-Criteria Decision-Making System and GIS, with Sustainability and Regeneration Approach: The Case Study of Tehran (IRAN)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

It would be advisable to provide more details of the application of the Delphi method. For example, the type of experts selected (sort of expertise, sex, age), the number of iterations, the queries, etc.
The maps' legends in figure 3 do not show the units. It is not easy to understand the analysis without these data.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors analyzed the resilience of Tehran using multicriteria analysis. This analysis is an interesting example of applying a well-known methodology to support new challenges.

The article is readable and has a logical structure. Only the description of the methodology needs improvement.

The authors wrote a very detailed explanation about the weighted method in Saaty’s AHP. The rest of the methodology needs more information and explanation. There are many different methods of transformation criteria values, and there are many various forms of aggregation function in multicriteria analysis. So it would be best if the authors showed, more precisely, what they have done in their research.

 

In lines: 211 – 213, the authors wrote:

“In the final step, by combining the spatial layers with the weights determined by the AHP method, a weighted map of the criteria was created. By combining all the weighted layers, a resilience map was created.”

There are many different ways of that combination in multicriteria analysis. Perhaps the most commonly used is the weighted linear combination (WLC). In WLC, criteria are multiplied by their weight and sum-up. Have the authors used WLC? Please place information about it here, or put the combination formula (aggregation function). Maybe some explanation why the authors chose that one – could be valuable.

The authors have placed information about reclassifying layers in the Research Methodology schema (Figure 2). It needs more explanation in the text of their paper. What kind of reclassification have the authors used. Was it the continuous reclassification by function? If yes – what kind of one?. Or maybe  - reclassification into range scale? If yes – the authors need to show the method of that reclassification.

In lines: 213 – 214, the authors wrote:

“Finally, using spatial statistics analysis, the ranking of resilience was determined and, consequently, the regeneration operation was prioritized.” - It also needs more explanation.

The authors could also improve the color scales for maps showing quantitative data.

Figure 1. Map of the Study Area – please, place the B, L (longitude and latitude) coordinates, not the x,y (projected). 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

What are the precise contributions of the study? Is it a novel integration of several different methods or a new area of methods applied? Please clearly identify in the introduction section.

The rationale of methodology development or methods applied in this study must be improved. Why did the authors need to use Delphi and MCDM methods for selecting criteria?

There are some past works, which applied the integrated methods (Delphi+MCDM) together to select criteria related to the sustainability field, but they are still neglected from the literature review. 

For example,

• "Improving the intellectual capital management approach using the hybrid decision method", Journal of Intellectual Capital, Volume 19, Issue 4, pp. 670 – 691.
• “A framework for prioritization of intellectual capital indicators in R&D”, Journal of Intellectual Capital, Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 277-293.

The abovementioned papers are also good examples highlighting the rationale of integrating Delphi and MCDM together.

Amount of experts or decision-makers participating in Delphi and AHP parts must be clearly identified. Especially, Delphi method requires several experts to provide reliable results.The characteristics or qualifications of them should be also added. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank the authors for including my comments in the paper's final version. I believe this has significantly improved the quality of the scientific argument. The authors completed their research article and made corrections.
At the stage of assessing the values of the criteria, the authors reclassified based on the standard deviation. This approach has two disadvantages: first, it works for values with a distribution close to the normal distribution, and second, it is better to maintain the continuity of the values by carrying out their linear transformation. After reclassification, the values are expressed on an ordinal scale, and performing mathematical operations such as multiplication and summation on them is questionable. While this is a common practice, it is not mathematically correct. In the following research, I propose to use a continuous approach based on the evaluation function and not on reclassification.

Reviewer 3 Report

All my comments have been responded. The overall quality of paper has reached the expected level.