Developing Solutions for Spatial Optimization Problems

Have you ever thought about what goes into ensuring that the packages you order online make it to your doorstep within their specified delivery window? Do you ever worry about the ability of your community’s fire, police, or emergency medical services to arrive promptly when you or your family is in need? The last time you took a flight, did you think about the complex logistics happening behind the scenes to ensure that your pilot, flight attendants, and even the plane made it to the right place at the right time so that you could get to your destination? Each of these scenarios presents us with an optimization problem that is founded on geography. In fact, in our modern society, a growing number of problems require spatially optimized solutions.

In this chapter, we will cover the topic of spatial optimization, which is a set of incredibly powerful spatial analysis tools that are used to find optimal or near-optimal...