Design of a computer application for the improvement of land management in livestock cooperatives.

 In addition to the land consolidation and land markets, another process that can help improve the land consolidation is the exchange of plots between owners. It is included in the recently approved Law 4/2015, of June 17, to improve the territorial structure of Galicia, which includes the voluntary exchange of plots as one of the processes to encourage.

The exchange of plots between several individuals is a problem that has a large number of possible solutions and that has a high computational cost. For example, if there are 5 owners with 20 plots per owner the number of possibilities is on the order of 1069.

To address this problem, the GAC has developed an algorithm based on genetic algorithms that taking an objective function, such as the sum of the distances between the plots of each owner, allows for acceptable solutions in a reasonable time. This algorithm is under development by the Operating Group for the Land Management Improvement on Husbandry Cooperatives, which includes Asociación de Desenvolvemento Rural Mariñas-Betanzos, Cusoviame (S.C.G.), Os Irmandiños (S.C.G.), Laboratorio do Territorio (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) and Instituto Galego de Calidade Alimentaria.

For testing, the algorithm was integrated into the server GeoServer, publishing using the standard protocol WPS, and an user interface was implemented, developed with OpenLayers and GeoExt.

In the following figures the initial situation of a test case and one of the solutions obtained are shown. Each colour represents the plots of an owner. You can also see a screenshot of the user interface developed.