Fractals, shapes with nonintegral or fractional dimension which manifest similar degrees of irregularity over successive scales, are used to produce a consistent measure of the length of irregular curves such as coastlines and urban boundaries. The fractal dimension of such curves is formally...

Several years' experience in building substantial prototype expert systems (involving several thousand lines of Prolog), mostly for engineering design codes using graphics, has led to the conclusion that Prolog is a very awkward language for representing several types of knowledge that are...

In the first part of this paper a view is presented of what environmental planning is and how it can be implemented, providing in support a brief review of key literature on planning theory and practice. The review points to limited success in adapting mathematical programming techniques from...

Few computer programs have been devised to assist local government planners draw up zoning schemes, despite the ubiquity of zoning schemes for expressing land-use plans. When one program, LUPLAN, representative of a broader class of plan-evaluation programs, was used to produce a zoning scheme,...

<i>FireCode</i> is an expert advisory system for assisting building designers to check their plans against the requirements of a fire safety code. This application of expert-systems methodology is rather unusual because much of the knowledge is already available in written form, reducing the effort...

City structure is taken to mean the size and shape of the city and the spatial concentration or dispersal of homes and workplaces. To classify differing structures, a land-use and transport interaction method, based on the classical transportation problem of operations research, is used. The...

Increasing specialisation and the growth of automated advice-delivery systems are creating new problems in legal responsibility and ethical behaviour. Engineering, planning, legal, and medical workers can expect early encounters with these difficulties, which are essentially concerned with a new...

An experiment is reported in which the relationship between judgments of goodness of example, interest, attractiveness, and preference is examined for a set of landscapes. Goodness-of-example judgments measure the discrepancy between an instance and a prototypical representation stored in a...