1 Problem Definition

Effective map generalisation involves careful examination of the interactions between all map symbols. These interactions may give rise to obvious graphic conflicts of proximity and overlap. They may also determine whether important messages, regarding the structure and form of the mapped features, are effectively communicated (for example, in the alignment of buildings, parallelism between neighbouring rivers and roads, and the clustering of woods and lakes). Graphic conflict can be addressed by a combination of possible actions such as elimination, displacement, amalgamation and boundary simplification, combined with appropriate techniques for evaluating the quality of the result. However, the application of an individual operator may have an effect on a map symbol that was not previously in conflict, resulting in propagation of conflict within the map space. A partial solution to this problem is for objects to be moved after scaling so that they remain distinct, visual entities. The research presented here, which is related to previous work [1] [2], describes a procedure that makes use of the displacement of multiple map objects in order to resolve graphic conflict.