A GIS Anchored System for Selection of Utility Service Stations through Hierarchical Clustering

The problem of allocating resources in spatial locations such as within an urban city or large regions in geographical area has attracted much research efforts recently. Some applications are available in GIS based applications but there is ample scope of creating various utility systems such as building patrol stations in a city, establishing medical clinics or schools in a town, deploying guards for security patrol in a zone, and budgeting on the quantity of street lamps to lit up an urban area. These problems are generalized as spatial resource allocation, where they commonly share the characteristics of meeting certain demands by a limited amount of resources. The demands are usually distributed, unevenly in a confined spatial area. Cluster detection is heavily used as a tool by the GIS scientists specializing in the field of spatial analysis and sometimes the above mentioned problems are being solved by employing the traditional clustering algorithms. In this paper a GIS anchored system has been proposed, which as input takes a digitized map, generally of a large region, with the population of the customers in different wards/areas fed as associated data and finally it suggests the suitable most location for constructing the utility service stations. The present technique takes as input, the number of desired utility service stations to be constructed and then forms cluster of the adjacent wards/areas using the Hierarchical method of clustering, under the condition that population of each cluster must be approximately equal. The proposed location of the utility service station and the areas covered up by any station are displayed graphically onto the map. The motivation behind selecting the location of the utility station is that, the allotment of the customers to any service station should be done in a uniform way or in other words none of the customer should travel long to reach his/her service station.