In the 2012 election for the US House of Representatives, only four of North Carolina’s thirteen congressional districts elected a democrat, despite a majority democratic vote. This raises the question of whether gerrymandering, the process of drawing districts to favor a political party, was employed. This study explores election outcomes under different choices of district boundaries. We repr...

Territory design can be defined as the problem which is focused on grouping small geographical areas into larger geographic clusters. These clusters may be referenced as territories. On this paper we develop the case where two or more attributes must be considered in order to setup an optimal territory design. We developed a new strategy which is based on a hybrid-mixed integer programming meth...

The 11 original regions for organ allocation in the United States were determined by proximity between hospitals that provided deceased donors and transplant programs. As liver transplants became more successful and demand rose, livers became a scarce resource. A national system has been implemented to prioritize liver allocation according to disease severity, but the system still operates with...

this paper is concerned with the consensus tracking problem of high order mimo nonlinear multi-agent systems. the agents must follow a leader node in presence of unknown dynamics and uncertain external disturbances. the communication network topology of agents is assumed to be a fixed undirected graph. a distributed adaptive control method is proposed to solve the consensus problem utilizing re...

In any consti tuency partitioned into two discrete and mutually exhaustive groups, the difference be tween a group's share of the eligible electorate and its share of the total population will depend, on the one hand, on the differences in the age structure and eligibility rates of the two groups and, on the other hand, it will also depend upon the relative population sizes of the two groups. W...

Territory-based routing approaches (TBRAs) are commonly used to achieve high service consistency, e.g., in the small package shipping industry, but their drawback is a decline in routing flexibility. Consequently, a high percentage of time-definite deliveries, as common in the small package shipping sector, should have a significant negative effect on the solution quality of TBRAs. To the best ...

auctions have been as a competitive method of buying and selling valuable or rare items for a long time. single-sided auctions in which participants negotiate on a single attribute (e.g. price) are very popular. double auctions and negotiation on multiple attributes create more advantages compared to single-sided and single-attribute auctions. nonetheless, this adds the complexity of the auctio...

Political districting is an intractable problem with significant ramifications for political representation. Districts often are required to satisfy some legal constraints, but these typically are not very restrictive, allowing decision makers to influence the composition of these districts without violating relevant laws. For example, while districts must often comprise a single contiguous are...

There has been considerable interest in the development of analysis techniques for Geographical Information Systems (GIS). This includes such normative spatial models as vehicle routing models, districting and turfing models for dividing up land into territories for schools, sales/service, and voting, and location models for identifying sites or patterns of sites to provide service accessibilit...