OPTIMIZATION IN RESIDENTIAL LAND SUBDIVISION

In view of soaring construction costs and land prices, cost-effective design is essential to provide affordable housing for low-income families. New settlement projects that provide housing can be considered as housing-development systems. In such projects there can be large variation in costs and quantitative design-efficiency indicators. Therefore, quantitative analysis and optimization techniques are required to achieve cost-effective design of a housing-development system, which is within the immediate sphere of influence of the designer. In this paper the system's nature of housing development and land-subdivision design are outlined, and two deterministic nonlinear (geometric) programming models are presented. Using these design-oriented models, a planner could obtain directly the cost-effective physical design of a land subdivision while fulfilling other given design constraints. The general applicability of the models to any rectilinear planning module is shown by calibrating and applying the same model for three different module patterns.