A multiple criteria heuristic solution method for locating near to optimal contiguous and compact sites in raster maps

A high performance heuristic solution method is proposed able to locate near to optimal sites composed by a given number of cells (raster structure). These sites must be compact and maximize levels of the sites intrinsic multiple criteria suitability. To validate the heuristic approach, a comparison with a mathematical formulation is performed with afforestation data of regions within the Netherlands, Denmark, and Flanders. This reveals that the heuristic is considerably faster than the mathematical method and the objective values obtained with the two approaches are substantially similar. A sensitivity analysis shows that the region's homogeneity plays an important role in the performance of the process identifying most favourable sites. Moreover, computation time follows a power model in the number of cells forming the site.