To reduce the unfairness incurred by partisan districting, citizen reformers usually advocate applying the conventional criteria of compactness and respect for political boundaries of subdivisions. Simple examples are constructed to address whether optimizing these criteria also minimizes partisan bias, measured as the difference between the seats-votes curves for the two parties. One set of ex...

We develop a measure of compactness based on the distance between voters within the same district relative to the minimum distance achievable, which we coin the relative proximity index. Any compactness measure that satisfies three desirable properties (anonymity of voters, efficient clustering, and invariance to scale, population density, and number of districts) ranks districting plans identi...

In this study we present straightforward optimization methods to address two problems associated with designing large scale ambulance operations on highways; the question of location and the issue of districting. Previous approaches tackled small scale problem instances using exact hypercube queuing models integrated into optimization procedures mainly due to excessive computer storage and runt...

Search and rescue operations following natural disasters have become the cornerstone for minimizing the adverse social effects and the impact of these hazards. Despite their importance, the literature has not adequately dealt with post disaster operations at least in part because of the difficulty in rapidly solving the mathematically complex problems involved. In this paper we consider two imp...

Automated political districting shares with electronic voting the aim of preventing electoral manipulation and pursuing an impartial electoral mechanism. Political districting can be modelled as multiobjective partitioning of a graph into connected components, where population equality and compactness must hold if a majority voting rule is adopted. This leads to the formulation of combinatorial...