A multi-type ant colony optimization (MACO) method for optimal land use allocation in large areas

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Optimizing land use allocation is a challenging task, as it involves multiple stakeholders with conflicting objectives. In addition, the solution space of the optimization grows exponentially as the size of the region and the resolution increase. This article presents a new ant colony optimization algorithm by incorporating multiple types of ants for solving complex multiple land use allocation problems. A spatial exchange mechanism is used to deal with competition between different types of land use allocation. This multi-type ant colony optimization optimal multiple land allocation (MACO-MLA) model was successfully applied to a case study in Panyu, Guangdong, China, a large region with an area of 1,454,285 cells. The proposed model took only about 25 minutes to find near-optimal solution in terms of overall suitability, compactness, and cost. Comparison indicates that MACO-MLA can yield better performances than the simulated annealing (SA) and the genetic algorithm (GA) methods. It is found that MACO-MLA has an improvement of the total utility value over SA and GA methods by 4.5% and 1.3%, respectively. The computation time of this proposed model amounts to only 2.6% and 12.3%, respectively, of that of the SA and GA methods. The experiments have demonstrated that the proposed model was an efficient and effective optimization technique for generating optimal land use patterns.