In the face of accelerating climate change, economic instability and limited resources, it is essential to find indicators that better measure the sustainable development of territorial units. Despite ambiguous definitions of sustainable development, numerous studies describe quantitative indicators of sustainable development. Main methodological problems include data availability and their use, spatial and time scales, selection of indicators, and their aggregation. Usually, analysts and decision-makers apply well known conventional methods that have numerous limitations. These methods in many cases cause excessive simplification of the real phenomena and relations between their determinants. Moreover, variables describing the development of territorial units (especially the environmental pillar) are often characterized by strong asymmetry or extreme observations. Even a single outlier for a given territorial unit may significantly affect the analysis and the resulting conclusions.

The objective of this paper is to present the application potential of a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach with an optimal tail selection to assess the sustainable development of territorial units. The proposed approach is based on the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and different methods of optimal tail selection of variable distribution. The Oja's spatial median and the optimal tail selection methods are used to reduce the impact of strong asymmetry and extreme values of variables. Moreover, the measure of cluster compactness is proposed for the evaluation of the proposed method. The proposed approach was used to assess the sustainable development of municipalities in Poland in 2018. We found that the automated Eye-Ball method and the Guillou and Hall's method enabled correct identification of extreme values of variables describing the economic, social, and environmental development of municipalities. This made it possible to distinguish the types of sustainable development level and its pillars and enabled to provide the statuses of the sustainable development level of the examined municipalities with respect to other municipalities in Poland.

面对气候变化加速、经济不稳定和资源有限，找到更好地衡量领土单位可持续发展的指标至关重要。尽管可持续发展的定义不明确，但许多研究描述了可持续发展的定量指标。主要的方法问题包括数据的可用性及其使用、空间和时间尺度、指标的选择及其汇总。通常，分析师和决策者会应用众所周知的传统方法，这些方法有很多局限性。在许多情况下，这些方法会导致对真实现象及其决定因素之间关系的过度简化。而且，描述领土单位（尤其是环境支柱）发展的变量通常以强烈的不对称或极端观察为特征。即使给定领土单位的单个异常值也可能显着影响分析和得出的结论。

本文的目的是展示具有最优尾部选择的多标准决策（MCDM）方法的应用潜力，以评估领土单位的可持续发展。所提出的方法基于与理想解相似的偏好顺序技术（TOPSIS）和不同的变量分布最优尾部选择方法。采用 Oja 的空间中位数和最优尾部选择方法来减少变量的强不对称性和极值的影响。此外，还提出了聚类紧凑性的度量以评估所提出的方法。所提出的方法用于评估 2018 年波兰城市的可持续发展。s 方法能够正确识别描述城市经济、社会和环境发展的变量的极值。这使得区分可持续发展水平及其支柱的类型成为可能，并能够提供被审查城市相对于波兰其他城市的可持续发展水平的状况。