Summary:

The land layout is one of the most important factors influencing the costs of conducting an agricultural business. An improper land layout results in additional farming costs and it reduces profitability of the agricultural production. This factor is therefore treated as one of the most important premises justifying the reor-ganization of spatial structure of a given area through land consolidation.
This dissertation is aimed at proposing a model of optimization of farm-land's layout, which shows the influence of its parameters on farming costs, and finding a solution in the next place. In addition to this, the theoretical discussion presented in the thesis broadens the knowledge of developing layouts of land plots and rural roads in the countryside ensuring the closest proximity of land to the farmstead and a proper land layout. A distinctive feature of the model is the division of countryside into design complexes, and then a further division of complexes into elementary small surface areas created in accordance with approved design methods of land plots. Long-striped elements, which were sectioned off, are subject to the optimization procedure that is to distribute them in a manner so as to minimize the average distance in the examined area. A crucial element of the model is the distance chart between farmsteads and a set of surface elements, which can comprise several million elements in the case of an average village.
One of the algorithms identifying the shortest routes in a graph was used for setting the distance and depicting the transport network of farms in the optimized area. The use of data structures presented on graphs allows for calculation of both the quality of individual road sections and the decline. The use of converted distances instead of actual ones between individual knots of the transformed graph make this operation workable.
The developed model of optimization allows for balancing shares in land of individual farms as provided for by elementary conditions set forth by valid legal provisions and the theory of land layouts. The decisive variables of the discussed model are selected stripes assigned to farms. For the assessment and optimization of model an objective function was used, which was an average distance between the farmland and settlements. The land assigned to farms in this way is further corrected as part of indeterminacy of optimal solution or a specified, permissible increase in the average land distance. These activities make it possible to define, at the final stage of optimization, boundaries of new land plots assigned to individual farms. The development of corrections helped to obtain a land layout that is characterized by the distance between the land and settlements kept to a minimum and a proper shape of land plots. The results of calculations also indicate precision, making it possible to use them in the design process.
Individual stages of gathering and preliminary processing of source data, the structure of the optimization model and subsequently its solution were exem-plified with the aid of the Wojków village (670 ha). Located in the county of Mielec, the village was subjected to land consolidation works in the years 2001-2004, which additionally facilitated the verification of obtained results. The accuracy of calculations was double-checked with the use of data representing the village of Filipowice which has a surface area bigger than Wojków and a serious land fragmentation (almost 1000 ha and more than 9000 on record). The obtained re-sults confirmed the accuracy of the proposed model as well as its usefulness for large facilities.
The developed method of rural land layouts has a number of potential ap-plications. First of all, it measures the effectiveness of landscaping in a given area by juxtaposing a new land layout with optimal solution. The second application can be the automation of selected design assignments performed as part of the consolidation process. The most interesting however seems to be forecasting with great accuracy what benefits might result from the consolidation of land based on the analysis of information contained in the descriptive and graphic part of land and building register survey. It allows for the creation of objective, research-supported criteria in processes related to the selection of areas for consolidation and verification of applications submitted for carrying out and financing this sort of activities