The Evaluation of the Coordinated Development between Subsystems: A Case in Nanjing of China

In order to evaluate the coordinated development of a system, a method named Synchronous Coordination Judgment (SCJ) is designed, which involves such five procedures as following. Firstly, a system is divided into several subsystems and a number of elements are chosen. Then, based on some criteria these elements are divided into three ranks. Secondly, in each subsystem the number of the elements in each rank is calculated, which is used to determine the state degree of the subsystem. The third step is to determine the line of Ideally Coordinated Development (ICD) and the state point (Q) of system in a specific state space. Fourthly, two distances----the vertical distance (d1) from Q to the line of ICD, and the distance (d2) between Q and the origin, can be calculated. Finally, based on the two distances, both the coordinated development between subsystems and the optimum degree of the system are evaluated. This method is adopted to evaluate the coordinated development between three subsystems (tourism, eco-environment and social economy subsystem) in Nanjing. The results indicate that the subsystems had been approaching coordinated development during 1996-2007. The paper suggests the SCJ method can be applied to evaluate the coordinated development of many subsystems.