"Will Craig, Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, suggested that Paul Densham, National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA), State University of New York, Buffalo, should receive the best paper award for his work on the integration of GIS, parallel processing and location-allocation algorithms. However, I would have given the award to Densham's paper on locaton-allocation and genetic algorithms, co-authored with and superbly presented by NCGIA's Catherine Dibble.

One concern is how to evaluate the best solution from succeeding generations. This is trivial with a single criterion but troublesome with multiple criteria -- especially when the payoff cannot be reduced to a common denominator. The difficulty of adding apples and oranges was addressed in another context in the October 1992 "Edge Nodes" column."

Nigel Waters
Reflections on GIS/LIS'93
GIS World, January 1994, page 64.


Catherine Dibble 27 June 2003