Optimal Districting and Territory Design

This book highlights recent advances in the field of districting, territory design, and zone design. Districting problems deal essentially with tactical decisions, and involve mainly dividing a set of geographic units into clusters or territories subject to some planning requirements. This book presents models, theory, algorithms (exact or heuristic), and applications that would bring research on districting systems up-to-date and define the state-of-the-art. Although papers have addressed real-world problems that require districting or territory division decisions, this is the first comprehensive book that directly addresses these problems. The chapters capture the diverse nature of districting applications, as the book is divided into three different areas of research. Part I covers recent up-to-date surveys on important areas of districting such as police districting, health care districting, and districting algorithms based on computational geometry. Part II focuses on recent advances on theory, modeling, and algorithms including mathematical programming and heuristic approaches, and finally, Part III contains successful applications in real-world districting cases.