Journal of the Korean Geographical Society ISSN:1225-6633(Print) 대한지리학회지

The goal of solving a contiguous land acquisition problem is to find an optimal cluster of land parcels so that one can move from an acquired parcel to another without leaving the cluster. In many urban and regional planning applications, criteria such as acquisition cost and compactness of acquired parcels are important. Recent research has demonstrated that spatial contiguity can be formulated in a mixed integer programming framework. Spatial compactness, however, is typically formulated in an approximate manner using parameters such as external border length or other shape indices of acquired land parcels. This paper first develops an alternative measure of spatial compactness utilizing the characteristics of the internal structure of a contiguous set of land parcels and then incorporates this new measure into a mixed integer program of contiguous land acquisition problems. A set of computational experiments are designed to demonstrate the use of our model in a land acquisition context.