Kybernetes

Emerald Article: Designing a GIS-based regional competitiveness evaluating

system
Bo Ling, Zhigang Chen, Yongcheng Lu

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To cite this document: Bo Ling, Zhigang Chen, Yongcheng Lu, (2010),"Designing a GIS-based regional competitiveness evaluating
system", Kybernetes, Vol. 39 Iss: 6 pp. 1009 - 1017
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Designing a GIS-based regional

competitiveness evaluating
system
Bo Ling

Competitiveness
evaluating
system
1009

Economics School, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

Zhigang Chen
Economics and Management School,
Shanghai Second Polytechnic University, Shanghai, China, and

Yongcheng Lu
Institute of Information and System Engineering,
Guangxi University, Guilin, China
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose a GIS-based regional competitiveness evaluating
software system. With a regional competitiveness evaluating software system, researchers can
compare their studies with each other, so that more generally accepted concepts, models, and
evaluating methodologies can be obtained. Furthermore, such a system can facilitate researchers to
conduct studies more efficiently and effectively, so that a deep insight into regional competitiveness
can be achieved.
Design/methodology/approach Based on the system theory, a thorough investigation into the
nature of a region and its competitiveness are conducted, so that the software designing demands are
identified and a client/server and browser/server architecture is proposed for the system. In addition,
the Delphi method is employed to improve the performance of the software system, while a primary
experimental study is conducted to verify its effectiveness.
Findings Developing such a software system, the GIS and database techniques should be
harnessed, while Delphi method should be employed to improve system performance.
Research limitations/implications Identifying evaluating index set and obtaining
corresponding data are the main limitations of the system working.
Practical implications The ideology of designing a regional competitiveness evaluating software
system is proposed.
Originality/value An efficient and generic methodology of evaluating regional competitiveness is
devised.
Keywords Cybernetics, Systems theory, China, Regional development, Research work,
Computer software
Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction
Regional competitiveness is a comprehensive indicator to portray regional economics
systems and it has been a hot topic in China recently. As such, many researches have
been conducted on the theory and application of regional competitiveness, including
definition, model, evaluation, and comparison. However, there still is neither a generally
accepted concept nor a study methodology. One of the important reasons is that there is
not been a generic research platform. Consequently, most of the researchers conduct their

Kybernetes
Vol. 39 No. 6, 2010
pp. 1009-1017
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0368-492X
DOI 10.1108/03684921011046780

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researches individually and manually, so that, on the one hand systematic investigations
can hardly be conducted. On the other hand, different researchers cannot compare their
ideologies, methodologies, and results with one another without a common criterion. To
address the problem and facilitate research breakthrough, we propose a GIS-based
regional competitiveness evaluating software system and obtain the following
achievements:
(1) Based on system theory, a thorough investigation into the region and its
competitiveness is conducted, so that the demands to design an evaluating
software system are identified.
(2) The architecture of the system is illustrated, and its components working
procedure are detailed.
(3) A primary experimental study has been conducted and the results are promising.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses related work. Section 3
invests the region system to identify the demands of designing an evaluating software
system. Section 4 illustrates the system. We conduct a primary experimental study in
Section 5 and conclude in Section 6.
2. Related work
Since the end of 1970, the competition among countries shifted its focus from military
field to the economic ones. As an important topic, the study on the regional
competitiveness has been gaining more and more attention from the governmental and
academic organization. First, many researchers (Bingan et al., 2000) try to give a
definition to regional competitiveness. Many researchers try to model the regional
competitiveness based on their own ideologies, such as IMD (2003). While some conduct
experimental studies. Unfortunately, all of the evaluations are conducted by hand and a
systematic study can hardly be conducted. The limitations of existing achievements
give a birth to the motivation to develop an intelligent evaluating software system.
Some researchers have begun to employ system engineering methodology to
analyze social issues (Kong and Zou, 2006; Zhang et al., 2006; Li, 2006), while they
seldom touch the topics of regional competitiveness. Although Zhou and Tian (2005)
studied the wrought reasons of regional competitiveness by means of systematic
economics. While their work just try to illustrate how the regional competitiveness
come into being with a description model. They have not touched the field of regional
competitiveness, not even to develop a software system.
Although several competitiveness evaluating software systems have developed, but
there is not a software system similar to ours.
3. An investigation to regional competitiveness systems
3.1 System theory-based definition
Although many definitions haven been given to the regional competitiveness, while it
is hardly to find one based on system science. Indeed, a region in the economics
community is a concept with complex hierarchy, which covering mangy factors,
including politics, economy, society, institution, environments, and so on. Therefore,
the concept of a region discussed in the paper is a regional economics system and
should be defined based on system theory.

Definition 1. A region is an unbalanced and open complex system of a national

economy system, which is a regionalism based and of humankind economic activity
centered organism, decided by its factors of society, science and technology, civilization
and education, and environment.
From the definition, we can find that a region discussed in the paper has following
characteristics:
.
a region is a system of strong connectedness of economic activity;
.
a region is an organism with self-contained economic structure;
.
a region is a component supervised by certain government; and
.
a region is an organism with certain operation law and interacts with its
environment.
According to the definition, we can further propose a definition to regional
competitiveness based on system theory.
3.2 Characteristics of regional competitiveness
Definition 2. Regional competitiveness is the comprehensive capability of a region
resulting from the capacity to attract resources from its domestic and abroad survival
environment or employ the resources of its owns, the favorable environments
supporting development and promoting economy increasing, the one enhancing living
quality of its residents. Further the regional competitiveness can be evaluated based on
a set of component factor index.
Since regional competitiveness is the holistic capability of its system, it has the
natures of the system, i.e. objective, holistic, hierarchical, correlative, dynamic character,
and so on:
.
Objective nature. Since a region is a complex open system, it has specific object of
enhancing its competitiveness. It should obtain both its practical competitiveness
and potential one: efficiently employing the resources to obtain favorable benefit,
realizing viable development.
.
Holistic nature. The competitiveness of a system is realized by the optimized
combination of all factors and the interaction among them. Furthermore, the
factors cannot be further partitioned any more.
.
Hierarchy nature. Regional competitiveness is a kind of system capability.
The system is made up of several sub-systems, while the sub-systems are resulted
from their sub-systems and so on. In a word, a region is a complex system with
certain structure and hierarchy, while the competitiveness result from its inaction
among all of its factors based on its specific hierarchy.
.
Correlative nature. The competitiveness of a region is achieved by the factors
connecting, interacting and constraining with one other: the system interacting
with its environment and adapting to its environment; its factors and sub-system
correlating with each other; the factors or sub-systems correlating with the
region system.
.
Dynamic nature. Since a region system is an open system, it structure and
functionalities continuously evolves dynamically, its competitiveness develops
dynamically as a result.

Competitiveness
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3.3 Principles of designing an evaluation software system

According to the nature of a region system, the design of an intelligent evaluating
software system should be comply with the following principles:
.
Generality. The software should be a generic system to serve as a platform on
which different research groups can implement their own ideology easily and
efficiently, so that they can conduct their research further deep and compare their
achievements with others.
.
Customization. The system should be able to meet with the different demands of
different users. Since different researchers may have different ideas for the
concept of regional competitiveness, they need to efficiently modify the system to
cater for their special demands.
.
Integration. The information employed to portray the competitiveness of a region
covers economics, politics, society, geography, environments, and so on. Further,
the information takes different forms, such as statistical data, documents,
longitude and latitude, etc. Therefore, the software must integrate several
technology, including, database, information retrieval, GIS, and XML, so that the
operation can be conducted.
4. Design of evaluating system
4.1 System architecture
Since the application of such a software system is a data-intensive application.
Furthermore, the models to analyze regional competitiveness is much complex, while
the computation is tremendous. As a result, the application is also of computingintensive. According to the character of such an application, this sort of software
system should be implemented on an architecture of client/server, which is shown by
Figure 1.
By taking such an architecture, many users can use the system at one time, so that
the storage and computing resource of the computer system can be efficiently explored.
And the cooperation and comparison can be easily carried out.

Database

Web server
Internet

Application server

Outer expert

Figure 1.
System architecture

Inner expert
Inner expert

4.2 System components

To facilitate the application extending, the software system should be developed based
on a strategy of component, which is shown in Figure 2.
From the figure, it can be found out that the software system is mainly made up of
seven components. They are detailed in turn as follows:
(1) Geographical information system. This component manages the geographical
information of regions, including their longitude and latitude, area, borderline,
natural environment, water system, traffic, and other infrastructure. Indeed,
it can serve as an independent GIS application, since it has the functionalities of
resources investigation and analysis, region plan, environment inspection, and
management. In our application, it is employed to manage spatial and resource
data, and display the analyzing results.
(2) Economics statistics database system. The main function of this component is to
manage social and economic statistic data of the regions, including GDP,
population, production value of three industries, and so on. The data managed
by the component are usually call hard index.
(3) Policy and environment repository. This component is used to manage the soft
index of regions, including document of politics and culture environment.
(4) Model library. This component manages the models harnessed to analyze
regional competitiveness. It is the most important part in the software system,
since it decides both efficiency and effectiveness of the software system. Further,
since the ideologies of researchers are differential from one other, different
researcher may take different models. Therefore, this component should be
independent and customize-enabled.
(5) Cache manager. This component is utilized to cache the recent operation results of
the system, so that the repeatedly analytical demands can be satisfied efficiently.
(6) Decision rule manager. This component manages the evaluating rules,
including experts selecting rule, questions, and scales developing rule, the rule

Competitiveness
evaluating
system
1013

User interface

Decision rule
Cache
manager

Geographical
information system

Model
library

Economics statistics
database system

Policy and
environment
repository

Figure 2.
System components and
their relationship

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of report the rule summarizing after each round enquiring and the rule of when
to reach a consensus.
(7) User interface. This provides a user-friendly environment for user operate the
software system. The component mainly has two functions:
.
facilitating users to import, manage, and maintain their regional
competitiveness information; and
.
displaying the analysis results to users by different means as demanded.
Figure 3 shows one of the user interfaces.
4.3 System functionalities
(1) Model management and comparison. The function is realized by the component
of Model manager. With the component, a researcher cannot only efficiently
manage, modify, and optimize the models designed by himself (or herself), but
also compare them with those designed by others conveniently.
(2) Regional competitiveness data management. It is accomplished by the four
components: GIS, economics-statistics database, and policy and environment
repository. Its two meta-operations are of insertion, deletion.
(3) Regional competitiveness analysis. This is the primary sort of functionality of
the application, including regional comprehensive (or holistic) competitiveness
analysis, and factor and sub-factor competitiveness analysis. Indeed, most of
the current researchers focus on the regional competitiveness analysis.
(4) Regional competitiveness profound investigation. These are of the advanced
functions accomplished by the four components mention in (3), such as similarity
of regional competitiveness and so on.

Figure 3.
User interface

5. Experiment study
The prototype is implemented with the tool of Microsoft.net. While its GIS platform is
of Mapx 5.0, DBMS is of SQLServer 2000, and operating system is of WindowsxP.
Further, evaluation granularity is of province, while the data set is based on Chinese
Year Book 2004.
After the development of the prototype being implemented, the gathered data are
imported and the system is run. The experiments verify all of the functionalities defined
above, while the system runs stably. Further, the operating resulting can be displayed
in different form as user demanded. In the following, a map- and a radar-based result is
presented.
Figure 4 shows the provincial regional competitiveness in the year of 2004. From the
figure, the regional competitiveness distribution in the year can be easily differentiated.
Figure 5 shows the holistic regional competitiveness in the year of 2004 of each
province. From the figure, we can easily find out the difference among the regional
competitiveness of each province of China.

Competitiveness
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system
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6. Conclusion
This paper addresses the issues of developing a regional competitiveness evaluating
software system. First, the definitions of a region and its competitiveness have been
proposed based on the theory of system science (Lin, 1987, 1988; Lin and Ma, 1989).
Furthermore, their natures are analyzes so that the demands of designing such a
software system have been identified. Then, the architecture and its components of the

Figure 4.
Results displayed
in map form

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Figure 5.
Results displayed
in radar form

system are illustrated, while its functionalities are described as well. Following that,
the strategy to improve the system operating results has been introduced to facilitate
the general recognition to be achieved. Finally, a primary experimental study has been
conducted and the results are promising.

References
Bingan, W., Zhenhua, C. and Huishan, Y. (2000), Regional Theory and Demonstration, Aviation
Industry Press, London (Chinese Version).
IMD (2003), The World Competitiveness Yearbook 2003, available at: www.01.imd.ch/wcy
Kong, X. and Zou, K. (2006), Evaluation method of fuzzy integral for the complex development
level of the society, Advances in Systems Science and Applications, Vol. 6 No. 3, pp. 401-5.
Li, X. (2006), A second-level evaluation model of fuzzy set on human resource value, Advances
in Systems Science and Applications, Vol. 6 No. 4, pp. 675-80.
Lin, Y. (1987), A model of general systems, Mathematical Modelling: An International J., Vol. 9
No. 2, pp. 95-104.
Lin, Y. (1988), Tree-like hierarchies of systems, International J. General Systems, Vol. 14 No. 1,
pp. 33-44.
Lin, Y. and Ma, Y. (1989), Remarks on the definition of systems, Systems Analysis Modelling
Simulation, Vol. 6 No. 11, pp. 923-31.

Zhang, S., Zhang, J. and Du, X. (2006), Evaluation on Chinese government agricultural
integrated management force, Advances in Systems Science and Applications, Vol. 6 No. 4,
pp. 584-91.
Zhou, Y. and Tian, P. (2005), An systematic economic analyzing on the wrought reason of
regional competitiveness, Foreign Economies and Management, Vol. 27 No. 6, pp. 53-8.
Corresponding author
Bo Ling can be contacted at: lingbo@fudan.edu.cn

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