Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Energy Management
The increasing interest in meeting rising energy demands in a
sustainable manner through reducing energy wastes and searching for renewable
energy alternatives has stimulated proposals aiming to exploit the functionality
of GIS to support the relevant locational decisions. These decisions concern the
identification and selection of marginal lands, i.e. lots and areas economically
unprofitable due to, for instance, their poor agricultural or residential potential,
where biomass production (Niblick et al.
2013
), least-cost bioenergy locations
(Panichelli and Gnansounou
2008
; Kaundinya et al.
2013
; Höhn et al.
2014
), data
center infrastructures (Trigueiros Covas et al.
2013
), corridors for electric lines,
solar and wind farms (Ramırez-Rosado et al.
2008
;Janke
2010
; Van Hoesen and
Letendre
2010
; Molina-Ruiz et al.
2011
) or renewable hybrid systems (Aydin et al.
2013
) can be located.
Transportation
Data availability constitutes a crucial aspect in transportation plan-
ning and management. Spatial socio-economic information, historical and current
data derived from users' interviews are fundamental to estimate modal-choice, trip
generation and distribution among zones of a given study area. Locational decisions
in this field concern the optimal positioning of new infrastructures (i.e. roads and
highways, parking lots, metro and railway stations, bus lines and stops, intermodal
terminals, airports, etc.). Such decisions are traditionally reached through cost-
benefit analysis. However the evaluation of cost as well as benefit is often a
very complex issue as, in general, many factors need to be taken into account
and various effects need to be evaluated. For instance, at regional level, new
transport infrastructures may boost local economy by improving productivity and
competiveness, while at urban level they may produce significant modifications on
the land-use activities, on environmental impact and on the real estate market. For
these reasons, GIS represent fundamental tools for combining and synthesizing the
multidimensional aspects of the relevant problems. Usually this is performed by
calculating, through an analysis of spatial and non spatial data, a set of appropriate
composite indicators to describe complex concepts such as the accessibility i.e. the
opportunities available to actual and potential users to reach given places (Gutiérrez
et al.
2010
; Mavoa et al.
2010
; Rogalsky
2010
; Neutens et al.
2012
)orthevalue
of time in the intermodal transport chain (Macharis and Pekin
2009
; Pekin et al.
2013
). Other examples of transportation location problems in which GIS have been
successfully exploited regard, for instance, the coverage of remote communities
through “essential air service” (Grubesic et al.
2012
), the location of bus stops
(Delmelle et al.
2012
), of bicycle facilities (Rybarczyk and Wu
2010
; García-
Palomares et al.
2012
) and of hydrogen stations (Kuby et al.
2009
).
Private and Public Sector Applications
Applications related to GIS based
approaches for solving FLPs that involve private or public sector facilities usually
concern a wide variety of contexts. Typical applications include the location of
emergency services (Liu et al.
2006
; Murray and Tong
2009
), health care facilities
(Cromley and McLafferty
2012
), public libraries (Park
2012
; Higgs et al.
2013
),
schools (Teixeira and Antunes
2008
; Zolnik et al.
2010
), taxi cab stands (Ocalir
et al.
2010
) and many others. These kinds of problems can generally be defined in
