Besides spatial elements, their spatial configuration is an important factor affecting urban image. In practice of urban planning, good designers do thoroughly consider goals of urban design and constraints of urban planning. In this paper taking the layout problems of a residential zone as background, a framework of procedural modeling and a constrained layout optimization approach is presented to simulate the design procedure of human. The approach represents design goals as cost function

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... ect to planning constraints. We can obtain the design plan by minimizing the objective function. During optimization, we adopt heuristic algorithm to get solutions efficiently for elements layout. Experiments show this approach is able to achieve similar design of residential zone to human work, by using less human resources.