An alignment problem

Abstract

This work concerns an alignment problem that has applications in many geospatial problems such as resource allocation and building reliable disease maps. Here, we introduce the problem of optimally aligning $k$ collections of $m$ spatial supports over $n$ spatial units in a $d$-dimensional Euclidean space. We show that the 1-dimensional case is solvable in time polynomial in $k$, $m$ and $n$. We then show that the 2-dimensional case is NP-hard for 2 collections of 2 supports. Finally, we devise a heuristic for aligning a set of collections in the 2-dimensional case.