Roger Z. Ríos-Mercado 
Optimal Districting and Territory Design 

This book highlights recent advances in the field of districting, territory design, and zone design. Districting problems deal essentially with tactical decisions, and involve mainly dividing a set of geographic units into clusters or territories subject to some planning requirements. This book presents models, theory, algorithms (exact or heuristic), and applications that would bring research on districting systems up-to-date and define the state-of-the-art.

 Although papers have addressed real-world problems that require districting or territory division decisions, this is the first comprehensive book that directly addresses these problems. The chapters capture the diverse nature of districting applications, as the book is divided into three different areas of research. Part I covers recent up-to-date surveys on important areas of districting such as police districting, health care districting, and districting algorithms based on computational geometry.  Part II focuses on recent advances on theory, modeling, and algorithms including mathematical programming and heuristic approaches, and finally, Part III contains successful applications in real-world districting cases.

Table of Content

Chapter 1. Research Trends in Optimization of Districting Systems.- Chapter 2. Police Districting Problem: Literature Review and Annotated Bibliography.- Chapter 3. A Review of Districting Problems in Health Care.- Chapter 4. Computational Geometric Approaches to Equitable Districting: A Survey.- Chapter 5. Bounding Procedures and Exact Solutions for a Class of Territory Design Problems.- Chapter 6. Mathematical Programming Formulations for Practical Political Districting.- Chapter 7. Multi-Period Service Territory Design.- Chapter 8. Designing Ambulance Service Districts under Uncertainty.- Chapter 9. Spatial Optimization Problem for Locating Polling Facilities and Stations and Policy Implications.- Chapter 10. Territory Design for Sales Force Sizing.

About the author

Roger Z. Ríos-Mercado is a professor of operations research in the Graduate Program in Systems Engineering at the Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Mexico. He holds a Ph D in Operations Research from the University of Texas at Austin. He has held visiting scholar positions at the University of Texas at Austin, Barcelona Tech, University of Colorado, and University of Houston. His research interests are mainly in designing and developing efficient solution methods to hard discrete optimization problems. He has addressed applied decision-making problems on districting, location analysis, healthcare, natural gas transportation systems, and scheduling. His research has been published in leading journals in the field. He has authored or coauthored, as editor, 2 books and 12 volumes of journal special issues in diverse areas of operations research and discrete optimization. He is currently an editor of
Computers & Operations Research and a member of the editorial board of
Operations Research Perspectives.