Abstract
Simultaneously locating and configuring the best site for a given land use or activity is a complex planning problem. This paper describes a method for addressing this problem that relies on a point-to-area neighborhood operator applied to a raster model of geographic space. This represents a synthesis of concepts drawn from cartographic modeling, optimal land allocation, and suitability mapping. The approach generates a mathematical field of best site boundaries that we call a site field. A site field does not lend itself to static visualization in two dimensions, and an interface for interactively exploring its contents is described. A significant benefit of adopting a neighborhood operator approach is that it serves to spatially decompose the global site search problem into a set of smaller, local problems. Therefore, the computational effort required to solve an optimal site search problem for a given cell in a raster representation of space is not tied to the number of cells in the global data set.
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