A Geovisual Analytics Approach to Spatial Multiple Objective Optimization

Multiple objective genetic algorithms (MOGA) are heuristics that have seen relatively little use in geographic information science and spatial decision support in comparison to other geocomputational methods, despite their potential to generate robust alternative options for decision making. MOGA based decision analysis relieves the burden of a priori preference specification by an analyst, but the resulting solution set is potentially large and one must sift through many feasible alternatives in an intelligent manner. Since the task of evaluating the alternatives can be cognitively difficult there is a need for visual and analytic approach to aid the decision option selection process. One solution based on such an approach and proposed in this paper is the integration of MOGA with geovisual analytic tools.