A genetic algorithm for fair land allocation

Abstract

The goal of the PROTERRA project of the Brazilian National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian reform (INCRA) is to establish settlements of multiple families on land which formerly had a single owner. The main problem which arises in the project is to subdivide the land into lots to be designated to the families. This problem is difficult since several constraints stemming from legal or ethical considerations have to be considered. Among the constraints are respecting natural reserves, balancing access to rivers with the size of the lots, and a fair distribution with respect to soil quality. This problem has been mainly solved manually until now. In this paper we propose a genetic algorithm to solve it. We present several algorithmic components including a constructive heuristic and recombination and mutation operators that take into account the specifics of the problem, propose a technique to generate artificial instances for testing, and report on experiments with five real-world and 25 artificial instances.