A parallel algorithm based on simulated annealing for land use zoning plans

There is an increasing demand for tools which support the land use planning process and one of the most complex tasks of this process is the design of a land use zoning map. With this aim an algorithm based on simulated annealing has been designed to optimize the delimitation of land use categories according to suitability and compactness criteria. The high number of plots involved in a land use plan leads to high computational costs. Two parallel versions were implemented. The first one improve the final solution using different parameters in parallel. The second one gets advantage of the spatial parallelism. Results on a real case of study show that the solutions provided by our algorithms are similar to the solution provided by experts, but much faster and with less effort. The parallel versions of the code present good results in terms of the quality of the solution