A multicriteria districting heuristic for the aggregation of zones and its use in computing origin–destination matrices

In this work, a set of optimality criteria is suggested which can be used to find “good” territorial aggregations and the Old Bachelor Acceptance heuristic is adopted to identify them. In order to understand the trade-off between these criteria, appropriate optimality indexes are introduced and their weighted combinations are minimized with several different sets of weights. This application refers to the city of Rome and the actual study, which involved statisticians, engineers and operations researchers, was supported by the local government (Comune di Roma). The experimental results on the city of Rome show that the Old Bachelor Acceptance heuristic finds aggregations with low values for all the indexes simultaneously. In particular, the results lead to the conclusion that certain sets of weights must be adopted if one wants to be sure to find “good” aggregations.