Making a Hard Political Decision Easy: Application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process for Urban Development Funds in the City of Madrid

Smart Cities have become the ideal place for applying the newest technological developments. A Smart City must be a living environment where there is also a similar economic growth for its citizens. Local governments dispose of powerful tools like Territorial Balance Funds that can be distributed among its different constituents to compensate economic misbalance. One of the hardest political decisions is to assign handouts to people who could think its own expectations are not being taken properly into account. Resources are very limited in local levels, and city council governments are pulled apart by those conflicting demands. The challenge of addressing a lot of criteria for making a decision can be modeled as a multi-criteria decision-making process. It is the goal of this paper to show that the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) could work out the most acceptable distribution of the Funds among the different city districts and neighborhoods.