In this paper, the problem of population districting in the health system of South Khorasan province has been investigated in the form of an optimization problem. Now that the districting problem is considered as a strategic matter, it is vital to obtain efficient solutions in order to implement in the system. Therefore in this study two meta-heuristic algorithms, Ant Lion Optimizer (ALO) and G...

Computer scientists and social scientists consider the political districting problem from different viewpoints. This paper gives an overview of both strands of the literature on districting in which the connections and the differences between the two approaches are highlighted.

This paper considers the problem of designing districts for vehicle routing problems with stochastic demands. In particular, demands are assumed to be uncertain at the time when the districts are made, and these are revealed only after the districting decisions are determined. Tabu search and multistart heuristics for this stochastic districting problem are developed and compared. Computational...

This paper investigates the problem of optimal districting in the context of a simple model of legislative elections. In the model, districting matters because it determines the seat-vote curve, which describes the relationship between seats and votes. The paper rst characterizes the optimal seat-vote curve, and shows that, under a weak condition, there exist districtings that generate this ide...

In the context of discrete districting problems with geographical constraints, we demonstrate that determining an (ex post) unbiased districting, which requires that the number of representatives of a party should be proportional to its share of votes, turns out to be a computationally intractable (NP-complete) problem. This raises doubts as to whether an independent jury will be able to come u...

The political districting problem has been studied since the 60’s and many different models and techniques have been proposed with the aim of preventing districts’ manipulation which may favor some specific political party (gerrymandering). A variety of political districting models and procedures was provided in the Operations Research literature, based on singleor multiple-objective optimizati...

Genetic algorithms (GA) have been found to provide global near optimal solutions in a wide range of complex problems. In this paper genetic algorithms have been used to deal with the complex problem of zone design. The zone design problem comprises a large number of geographical tasks, from which electoral districting is probably the most well known. The electoral districting problem is describ...