An Interactive Decision Support System for Analyzing Time Related Restrictions in Renaturation and Redevelopment Planning Projects

TL;DR

The paper tackles the challenge of renaturation and redevelopment planning under time-based legal restrictions embedded in large volumes of georeferenced but unstructured documents. It presents an interactive decision support system that extracts temporal constraints, links them to geospatial data using a Neo4j graph model, and delivers a multi-view visualization (maps and timeline) to plan, monitor, and verify compliance for new and existing projects. The approach enables polygon-based project planning, rapid overlap analysis, and temporal querying to time construction activities in accordance with breeding, pruning, and other restrictions, thereby expediting decision-making and reducing reliance on specialist memory. This has practical impact for regional planning (e.g., LMBV) by making regulatory knowledge explicit, searchable, and directly actionable in planning workflows.

Abstract

The operation of open-cast lignite mines is a large intervention in nature, making the areas uninhabitable even after closing the mines without renaturation processes. Renaturation of these large areas requires a regional planning process which is tied to many conditions and restrictions, such as environmental protection laws. The related information is available only as unstructured text in a variety of documents. Associated temporal aspects and the geographical borders to these textual information have to be linked manually so far. This process is highly time-consuming, error-prone, and tedious. Therefore, the knowledge of experts is often used, but this does not necessarily include all the relevant information. In this paper, we present a system to support the experts in decision-making of urban planning, renaturation, and redevelopment projects. The system allows to plan new projects, while considering spatial and temporal restrictions extracted from text documents. With this, our presented system can also be used to verify compliance with certain legal regulations, such as nature conservation laws.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: The main decision support system with multiple views. (a) and (b) are two linked maps showing the same section. In (b), polygons of the category "active dismantling" are displayed, whereby one was selected (orange border). By brushing, this polygon is also displayed in (a). In (a), a new project is planned by drawing a new polygon. (c) is the information panel, which lists important documents and their contents, as well as a list of all polygons that overlap with the selected one. (d) is a timeline visualization that shows how many documents are available in the displayed area.
• Figure 2: A section of the graph data model showing two polygon nodes, each with a document node, and two restriction type nodes. The upper document node contains two sentences regarding breeding times, the attributes such as the corresponding sentence as well as the time points of this restriction are stored at the corresponding edge.
• Figure 3: (a) A polygon is drawn directly onto the map, constructing it from individual points. (b) When the path is closed, the polygon can be saved in a suitable category.
• Figure 4: The timeline visualization with different level-of-details and applied filters. (a) shows several months in between 2020 and 2023. (b) shows a part of the same interval on a daily-level, revealing that almost all of the documents for March 2022 are related to the 4th March. (c) shows the same interval as (a) when using the "Requirement" environmental protection as mandatory.
• Figure 5: (a) A new project, a bicycle path, is drawn over the map and then saved in the database. (b) Then other projects are listed in the information panel that overlap with the newly created one. Here, a nature reserve is listed, which is subject to various restrictions, including two from the category of breeding times.