MULTIOBJECTIVE DECISION SUPPORT FOR THE TOURIST SECTOR

Abstract

The volume of recent sustainable tourism development literature has suggested a number of ideas and proposals to be taken into consideration, such as the establishment of some critical threshold to growth, known as carrying capacity. This theoretical concept, exported from the fields of Demography and Biology, is introduced in tourism research as a useful tool in order to put into practice different strategies for the operationalization of sustainable development. In this paper a multiple objective modeling process is
suggested to allow for both positive and negative impacts of tourism. In this way, multiobjective programming techniques prove to be of great value for the determination of the tourist carrying capacity. The proposed strategy, which may be used to assist managers in the decision-making process, must be understood as a further attempt to approximate the quantification of such a complex concept.