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.

This volume contains the papers selected for presentationat IPCO VI, the Sixth InternationalConferenceonInteger ProgrammingandCombinatorialOptimi- tion,held inHouston,Texas,USA, June22{24,1998.TheIPCOseriesofconf- ences highlights recent developments in theory, computation, and applications of integer programming and combinatorial optimization. These conferences are sponsoredby the Mathematical ProgrammingSociety, and are held in the years in which no International Symosium on Mathema- cal Programming takes place. Earlier IPCO conferences were held in Waterloo (Canada) in May 1990; Pittsburgh (USA) in May 1992; Erice (Italy) in April 1993; Copenhagen (Denmark) in May 1995; and Vancouver (Canada) in June 1996. The proceedings of IPCO IV (edited by Egon Balas and Jens Clausen in 1995) and IPCO V (edited by William Cunningham, Thomas McCormick, and Maurice Queyranne in 1996), were published by Springer-Verlag in the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science as Volumes 920 and 1084, respectively. The proceedings of the rst three IPCO conferences were published by organizing institutions. A total of77 extended abstracts,mostly of an excellentquality, wereinitially submitted. Following the IPCO policy of having only one stream of sessions over a three day span, the ProgramCommittee selected 32 papers. As a result, many outstanding papers could not be selected. The papers included in this volume have not been refereed. It is expected that revised versions of these works will appear in scienti c journals. The Program Committee thanks all the authors of submitted extended - stracts and papers for their support of the IPCO conferences.

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.