Spatial optimization for land use planning: Opportunities and challenges
Abstract
Spatial optimization has been a challenging and active topic for decades in many different fields, such as geography, spatial planning, regional science, operations research, environmental studies, and engineering (Cao, 2017). Land use planning is a process of land resource allocation, by which different land uses or activities are assigned to specific land units within a region. This process requires the support of spatial optimization, which is able to ac‐ count for multiple and conflicting objectives together with constraints under certain spatial contexts. Apparently, the spatial context brings much more complexity to this type of optimization problem, thus posing huge challenges for scholars, practitioners, and decision‐makers in the field.