## Towards a Unified Territory Design Approach – Applications, Algorithms and GIS Integration

• Territory design may be viewed as the problem of grouping small geographic areas into larger geographic clusters called territories in such a way that the latter are acceptable according to relevant planning criteria. In this paper we review the existing literature for applications of territory design problems and solution approaches for solving these types of problems. After identifying features common to all applications we introduce a basic territory design model and present in detail two approaches for solving this model: a classical location–allocation approach combined with optimal split resolution techniques and a newly developed computational geometry based method. We present computational results indicating the efficiency and suitability of the latter method for solving large–scale practical problems in an interactive environment. Furthermore, we discuss extensions to the basic model and its integration into Geographic Information Systems.

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Author: J. Kalcsics, S. Nickel, M. Schröder urn:nbn:de:hbz:386-kluedo-13623 Berichte des Fraunhofer-Instituts für Techno- und Wirtschaftsmathematik (ITWM Report) (71) Report English 2005 2005 Fraunhofer-Institut für Techno- und Wirtschaftsmathematik 2005/01/31 Geographical Information Systems; optimization algorithms; political districting; sales territory alignment; territory desgin Fraunhofer (ITWM) 5 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik / 51 Mathematik / 510 Mathematik Standard gemäß KLUEDO-Leitlinien vor dem 27.05.2011

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