Natural Area Coding Based Postcode Scheme

Abstract

Traditionally, addresses were used to direct people and helped in social activities; nowadays addresses are used in a wide range of applications, such as automated mail processing, vehicles navigation, urban planning and maintenance, emergency response, statistical analyses, marketing, and others, to ensure necessities induced by new information technologies and facility developments. On top of addresses primary use, postcodes systems were developed to comprehensively provide a variety of public and commercial services. Postcode being an integral part of an addressing system, if well-established, a postcode system brings further social-economic development benefits to a country. This paper aims at designing a postcode based on the Natural Area Coding (NAC). The design focuses on designing a standardized postcode that can fit into any addressing scheme and be used for towns and cities of any shapes from structured cities to slums. Design considerations of a fine-grained postcode (easy for humans, efficient for computerized systems and requiring less or no maintenance over time to improve its efficiency) have proven to be difficult to realize. Therefore, in this paper a new logic is illustrated whereby these considerations are rationally handled while simultaneously allowing the postcode to give a sense of directions and distance. The technique used in this paper can be tailored to a city of any size. As such, a city is divided up into concentric rectangles of which sizes vary from one to three level 3 NAC cells, each NAC cell containing approximately 30×30 plots of 20×50 m2. In this paper, a conversion algorithm is proposed to compute the postcode back and forth to NAC