Three developments have created challenges for political representation in the U.S. and particularly for the use of territorially based representation (election by district). First, the demographic complexity of the U.S. population has grown both in absolute terms and in terms of residential patterns. Second, legal developments since the 1960s have recognized an increasing number of groups as e...

Voting systems in which voters are partitioned to districts encourage accountability by providing voters an easily identifiable district representative, but can result in a selection of representatives not representative of the electorate’s preferences. In some cases, a party may have a majority of the popular vote, but lose the elections due to districting effects. We define the Misrepresentat...

To study the size effect on the properties of copper, tensile tests were performed with pure copper foil (thickness range from 25 μm to 300 μm) by cold rolling. A pronounced size effect was observed at a thickness of 76 μm. The results showed that ultimate strength increased as sample thickness decreased from 300 μm to 100 μm, however, this was decreased as the thickness changed from 76 μm to 2...

The ability of nature inspired search algorithms to efficiently handle combinatorial problems and their successful implementation in many fields of engineering and applied sciences has led to the development of new, improved algorithms. In this paper, an improved harmony search algorithm (IHS) is presented, while a holistic approach in solving the problem of post-disaster infrastructure managem...

In this text a new approach to zone design is put forward, this approach relies on the use of point data to do what has usually been done through the use of polygons (Openshaw et all 1995, Martin 2000). This approach can be extended to a wide range of problems characterized by the need to aggregate m points into a smaller group of n points, given a certain optimization objective. It is felt tha...

Social scientists have made progress in providing the courts with useful measures of partisan asymmetry in the transformation of votes to seats, but have thus far left a larger question unanswered: how can partisan gerrymandering be distinguished from a state legislature’s acceptable efforts to apply traditional districting criteria, keep communities of interest together, and facilitate the rep...

As various geospatial images are available for analysis, there is a strong need for an intelligent geospatial image processing method. Segmenting and districting digital images is a core process and is of great importance in many geo-related applications. We propose a flexible image segmentation framework based on generalized Voronoi diagrams through Euclidean distance transforms. We introduce ...

This paper studies a districting problem which arises in the context of financial product pricing. The challenge lies in partitioning a set of small geographical regions into a set of larger territories. In each territory, the customers will share a common price. These territories need to be contiguous, contain enough customers and be as homogeneous as possible in terms of customer value. To ad...

This paper addresses a commercial districting problem arising in the bottled beverage distribution industry. The problem consists of grouping a set of city blocks into territories so as to maximize territory compactness. As planning requirements, the grouping seeks to balance both number of customers and product demand across territories, maintain connectivity of territories, and limit the tota...