Applying Genetic Algorithms to Multi-Objective Land Use Planning

This paper explores the application of multiobjective Genetic Algorithms (mGAs) to rural land use planning, a spatial allocation problem. Two mGAs are proposed. Both share an underlying structure of: fitness assignment using Pareto-dominance ranking, niche induction and an individual replacement strategy. They are differentiated by their representations: a fixedlength genotype composed of genes that map directly to a land parcel's use and a variablelength, order-dependent representation making allocations indirectly via a greedy algorithm. The latter representation requires additional breeding operators to be defined and post-processing of the genotype structure to identify and remove duplicate genotypes. The two mGAs are compared on a real land use planning problem and the strengths and weaknesses of the underlying framework and each representation are identified.