Towards a multiple placement land suitability evaluation framework

Land evaluation techniques help decision-makers find sites for locating entities such as public utilities, residential, agricultural, commercial and industrial areas. The suitability of a given site depends upon the relationship of that site with other features or entities in the environment. Location decision making is a vast area where different approaches solve different problems. Land suitability evaluation techniques arguably encompass the most generic approach to location analysis but do not generally consider the placement of more than one new entity at any one time. On the other hand, location-allocation methods are especially suited for multiple placements but require specific mathematical formulations where different circumstances necessitate different constructions. This article highlights the implications of time on multiple placements and the effects of dependencies between newly placed entities. We present a unified framework to clarify these issues and provide a generic approach for problem solving.