Political redistricting by computer
Communications of the ACM
Temporal Visualization of Planning Polygons for Efficient Partitioning of Geo-Spatial Data
INFOVIS '05 Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization
DD-PREF: a language for expressing preferences over sets
AAAI'05 Proceedings of the 20th national conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2
Multiobjective hypergraph-partitioning algorithms for cut and maximum subdomain-degree minimization
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
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We describe an application of AI search and information visualization techniques to the problem of school redistricting, in which students are assigned to home schools within a county or school district. This is a multicriteria optimization problem in which competing objectives must be considered, such as school capacity, busing costs, and socioeconomic distribution. Because of the complexity of the decision-making problem, tools are needed to help end users generate, evaluate, and compare alternative school assignment plans. A key goal of our research is to aid users in finding multiple qualitatively different redistricting plans that represent different tradeoffs in the decision space. We present heuristic search methods that can be used to find a set of qualitatively different plans, and give empirical results of these search methods on population data from the school district of Howard County, Maryland. We show the resulting plans using novel visualization methods that we have developed for summarizing and comparing alternative plans.