Electoral districting and gerrymandering are problems as old at the United States itself. In this project, by employing opinion dynamics on some social networks and using their community structure, we seek to model elections in a two party political system like the USA and simulate the phenomenon that gerrymanders attempt to use to their advantage electorates within different districts or spher...

While single-member districting (smd) is the most common form of representation in the U.S., apportionment schemes at the state and local level often make use of multimember districts (Klain 1955; Jewell 1971), the polar type of which is, of course, the at-Iarge election; •'̂ and in one state (New York) weighted voting is the most common of the various systems in use for county government.^ In t...

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 paper deals with the problem of defining the territories for I68 sales agents of a German manufacturer of consumer goods. About 1400 postal areas constitute the basic geographical units. The problem is solved by means of a location-allocation approach involving a standard code of a primal network algorithm as well as a new heuristic for resolving split areas. Numerical results and the imple...

Webster’s Dictionary defines location as (1) position in space, and (2) an area marked off for a specific purpose. Hence, a location problem would involve identifying a specific position or place for a specific function or activity. There are several common types of location problem associated with GIS. The most common involves the measurement of where something exists. Given adequate time, it ...

In this paper, we present an empirical evaluation of a metaheuristic approach to a commercial districting problem. The problem consists of partitioning a given set of basic units into p districts so as minimize a measure of territory dispersion. Additional constraints include territory connectivity and balancing with respect to several criteria. To obtain feasible solutions to this NP-hard prob...

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...