Comparison of different optimization based land reallocation models

Abstract Land reallocation, which is an optimization problem in the field of engineering, is the process of reallocating parcels to pre-determined blocks according to the preferences of landowners. In practice, this is done manually and takes weeks or even months. The elongation of this process affects both the cost of the project and the project's acceptability by the landowners and thus the success of the project. Because the success of land consolidation projects is determined by the satisfaction of the landowners. For these reasons, the optimization-based land reallocation studies have been extensively carried out recently. However, these methods in the literature are not used in practice and the reallocation is still done manually. Therefore, for the first time in this study, two new reallocation models were developed to solve this problem by using Migration Birds and Simulated Annealing Algorithms and the results of these methods in a real project area were compared. Additionally, the results were compared to the conventional reallocation method (manual reallocation) to evaluate the performance of the methods developed. Both proposed methods provided a successful and practicable reallocation plan in a very short time with respect to the conventional one.