Design and realization of electronic sand table system for regional planning of Chongqing
重庆市区域规划电子沙盘系统的设计与实现

This paper introduces the design and realization process of electronic sand table system for regional planning of Chongqing under the platform of ArcGIS by ESRI through secondary development by Visual Basic for Application (VBA). That it is called electronic sand table, sometimes digital sand table or virtual sand table, is contrast with traditional material sand table model. Unlike material sand tables, electric sand table is new high-tech product with integration of computer application, visual reality, Geographical Information System, virtual reality and multimedia. It can give users a real-time and interactive operation circumstance. Electronic sand tables break the limits of traditional sand tables such as large area, inconvenient for carrying, single content, and difficult to update. It has practical functions towards regional planning apart from the functions of traditional material sand table, such as assisting design planning scheme, managing spatio-temporal attribute of planning objects, analysing spatial affects and evaluating the planning blueprint, etc. In this paper, also, we analyse great significance of applying electronic sand table to regional planning and the profound effects that electronic sand table brings to regional planning. In the recent years, electronic sand table has been applied in many fields to a certain extent, such as military affairs, irrigation works, real estate, fire protection, but little in regional planning. From this article, we provide a new mode in which we carry on regional planning and we successfully test it through taking the Chongqing city as a case. This mode breaks the traditional idea, its vividness and third dimension can help geographers and regional policy decision-makers to gain a better understanding of the regions, and electronic sand table will become their right hand some time later.