Nonlinear Programming Approaches to National Settlement System Planning

Abstract

Three rather aggregate approaches to modelling interregional migration processes within a context of national urban settlement systems are described. General, modified penalty-function methods of nonlinear programming are developed and then adapted for application to the simplest of the three migration models. The properties of numerical convergence of the procedure are discussed. Some of the numerical results of a case study for a Canadian urban system are interpreted. Finally, some extensions to the procedures used in this study, as well as alternative approaches to the same problem, or similar problems, are suggested.