This paper presents a software development approach to customize the GIS software ArcGIS (by ESRI) for spatial decision support. For the case study, example data of the Queme catchment in Benin (Africa) is used to program such a system which will be used to plan the establishment of potential small water reservoirs. Therefore, a new user menu in ArcGIS is introduced which allows (i) the integration of available GIS data from geo-databases, (ii) the easy application of spatial analyses by using implemented expert knowledge, and (iii) the automatic production of maps and reports for potential locations. To fulfil these requirements, the developer software Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in combination with the ArcObjects library is used as the programming environment. ArcGIS comes with a VBA interface and with the above-mentioned library. Therefore, the software engineer is able to create a comprehensive and user friendly system for spatial decision support which includes numerous analyses tools of ArcGIS. Additionally, various user views can be realized basing on the same platform. First preliminary results show the potential capability of the above-described approach and justify the usage of the ArcGIS software to create spatial decision support systems.
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