Spatial contiguity optimization in land acquisition

Abstract

Spatial contiguity is of great importance for land acquisition in many planning situations, such as industrial site selection, forest management and reserve design. Because large, contiguous land is often difficult to acquire in an urban region, numerous land acquisition models have been proposed to select land parcels with a high degree of contiguity. However, a recognized drawback of existing models is that optimal contiguity is not necessarily guaranteed. This is because proxy measures of contiguity are relied upon. Recently, a measure of relative contiguity has been developed, overcoming measurement issues and shape bias. In this paper a new multi-objective land acquisition model incorporating relative contiguity explicitly is presented. A modified greedy interchange heuristic is designed to solve this model. Example applications are utilized to demonstrate the capabilities of this new model, as well as provide comparison with existing approaches. © 2007, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.