Abstract: With the development and application of Information Technology and Geographic Information System in the past decades, the traditional approach in the research on space and land use changes has changed from statistical analysis to dynamical simulation and forecasting. As policy prescription has increasingly favoured a planning approach to regulate and control urban spatial changes, decision-making support for urban and rural planning has attracted a great focus from scholars in this area. Research approaches in this field, in a vast and varied range, include spatial analysis, urban modeling, geosimulation, virtual reality, etc. In this article, based on the review of research progress around the world in this field and the discussion on future research trends, a new concept, namely, service resources, in planning support systems for urban and rural planning, was introduced. The service resources in planning support were divided into three categories: data as a service (DaaS), application programming interfaces as a service (APIaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). In order to explain this new concept well, the researches on planning support systems (PSSs) worldwide were reviewed in the three aspects. Many case studies and researches in this area, from the development of GIS to employment of cloud computing for urban simulation, were also reviewed, and the review helped further discuss how the service resources are integrated into the researches to change PSSs development. Detailed information about the synthesis of DaaS and APIaaS with PaaS for planning support was introduced and emphasized as well. The development of PSSs has gone through the stages from statistical analysis to presentation by 2 dimension GIS or remote sensing data, to dynamical simulation by combining GIS or remote sensing data in simulation models. As for the development of Virtual Reality (VR), VR technology began to be used to visualize and present urban planning and design schemes, which allowed PSSs turn into 3 dimension visualization and modeling. In the meantime, the concept of collaborative planning was gradually replacing traditional planning concept, and the researches on PSSs also started to focus on this topic. GIS dataset, simulation models and web service began to be integrated into one platform, made possible by the development of cloud computing. Thus, the development of DaaS, APIaaS and PaaS will be a new trend and also a necessity for the researches on the support for urban and rural planning. This paper includes 4 sections. Section 1 introduces the background of the current work. The concept and classification of service resources for planning support of urban and rural planning is introduced in section 2, as well as a detailed review on current development regarding to these service resources. Then, how to develop PSSs by integration of the DaaS, APIaaS and PaaS is discussed in section 3. Last, in section 4 the current status of the development of the integration is reviewed and the future developmental trend in this research area is also discussed to help researchers to do more standardized and systematized researches in the future.

Key words: Planning Support System(PSS), service resources, synthesized technology, urban-rural planning