For many companies it is important to protect their physical and intellectual property in an efficient and economically viable manner. Thus, specialized security companies are delegated to guard private and public property. These companies have to control a typically large number of buildings, which is usually done by teams of security guards patrolling different sets of buildings. Each buildin...

Researchers in the area of electoral systems have recently turned their attention to network flow techniques with the aim to resolve certain practically relevant problems arising in this area. The aim of the present paper is review some of this work, showing the applicability of these techniques even to problems of a very different nature. Major emphasis will be placed on “biproportional apport...

BARD is the first (and at time of writing, only) open source software package for general redistricting and redistricting analysis. BARD provides methods to create, display, compare, edit, automatically refine, evaluate, and profile political districting plans. BARD aims to provide a framework for scientific analysis of redistricting plans and to facilitate wider public participation in the cre...

Aggregating areas into larger regions is a common problem in spatial planning, geographic information science, and cartography. The aim can be to group administrative areal units into electoral districts or sales territories, in which case the problem is known as districting. In other cases, area aggregation is seen as a generalization or visualization task, which aims to reveal spatial pattern...

We design and analyze a protocol for dividing a state into districts, where parties take turns proposing a division, and freezing a district from the other party’s proposed division. We show that our protocol has predictable and provable guarantees for both the number of districts in which each party has a majority of supporters, and the extent to which either party has the power to pack a spec...

The drawing of congressional districts by legislative bodies in the United States creates a great deal of controversy each decade as political parties and special interest groups attempt to divide states into districts beneficial to their candidates. The genetic algorithm presented in this paper attempts to find a set of compact and contiguous congressional districts of approximately equal popu...