Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Public Facility Planning By Using Geographic Information System (GIS) and Location Allocation (LA) Model



The public facility is defined as the facility to which people must travel to receive the service, or from which a service is provided to the whole community of interest in administration, economy, education, health, scientific research and physical training (China Standard GB/T. 50280-98, 1998). They provide important goods and services which contribute to and enhance the quality of life (Massam, 1993). They include schools, libraries, stadiums, hospital, clinics and other public facility. Public facilities are important because they both provide desirable services to and impose undesirable impacts on those who use the city, and from the market perspective, land to be developable must have access to a network of facilities (Yi, 2004).
Optimal allocation of school is a type of social service public facility planning; and GIS as well as location-allocation models have been extensively used for facility planning. “For well functioning of a city it is very important to ensure the optimum location of different public facility. But in many countries public facility generally apply as planning standards, such as how many acres of parks and play ground or how many schools are needed for a certain number of population. But these general approaches may not find the best sites for facilities” (Islam and Amin, 2006 p.73). 
By contrast of location-allocation (LA)   models can be used to find the optimal location of facilities. More specially location-allocation models attempt to find the best location of facilities optimizing the one or more objectives namely; minimum average/total distance, minimum distance, equal assignment, threshold constrain and capacity constrain. Most of the location allocation models are single objective and desired for a single level of facility. Although much progress has been made in developing models which handle are multiples objectives (Yeh and Chow, 1996).
The main drawback of using location-allocation model in facility planning is that the optimal locations identified may be not being a practical solution. Facilities may be located in unusable area, such as seas, river, road or land occupied by another land use that is very costly to demolish and relocate (Yeh and Chow, 1996).
To avoid this situation have a good opportunity for the integrations of GIS and location allocation models which can take full advantage of these two approaches. Optimal locations of facilities are first identified by using location allocation model circular buffers are then draw around them to specify areas and use land suitability analysis  which are considered to be acceptable solution for locating the public facilities. These solution spaces can then be used by decision maker for further evaluation of suitable sites which fall within, or close to the solution space.

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