Multi-objective evolutionary algorithm for land-use management problem

Abstract

Due to increasing population, and human activities on land to meet various demands, land uses are being continuously changed without a clear and logical planning with any attention to their long term environmental impacts. Thus affecting the natural balance of the environment, in the form of global warming, soil degradation, loss of biodiversity, air and water pollution, and so on. Hence, it has become urgent need to manage land uses scientifically to safeguard the environment from being further destroyed. Owing to the difficulty of deploying field experiments for direct assessment, mechanistic models are needed to be developed for improving the understanding of the overall impact from various land uses. However, very little work has been done so far in this area. Hence, NSGA-II-LUM, a spatial-GIS based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, has been developed for three objective functions: maximization of economic return, maximization of carbon sequestration and minimization of soil erosion, where the latter two are burning topics to today's researchers as the remedies to global warming and soil degradation. The success of NSGA-II-LUM has been presented through its application to a Mediterranean landscape from Southern Portugal.