Compactness in spatial decision support: A literature review

Abstract

The development of Spatial Decision Support Systems (SDSSs) which explicitly consider spatial relations has had a significant growth over recent years. The main intention of this paper is reviewing spatial optimization approaches for identifying contiguous and compact areas fulfilling particular criteria. These approaches explicitly consider topological spatial relations between geographical entities (cells, lines, points, areas). In this direction, spatial optimization techniques as heuristics, meta-heuristics, and mathematical programming are reviewed. Since the application fields, the nature of the approaches, the data format, and the size of the reviewed works are very diverse, high level comparison is made in order to identify critical issues regarding the identification of contiguous and compact areas in digital geographical information.