Article ID: | iaor20042180 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 144 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 12 |
End Page Number: | 26 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2003 |
Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Laporte Gilbert, Erkut Erhan, Bozkaya Burcin |
Keywords: | heuristics, programming: multiple criteria |
In political districting problems, the aim is to partition a territory into electoral constituencies, subject to some side constraints. The most common side constraints include contiguity, population equality, compactness, and socio-economic homogeneity. We propose a formulation in which the various constraints are integrated into a single multicriteria function. We solve the problem by means of a tabu search and adaptive memory heuristic. The procedure is illustrated on real data from the city of Edmonton.