This book highlights recent advances in the field of districting, territory design, and zone design. Districting problems are similar to clustering problems in the sense that both seek to find suitable partitions of the problem; however, there are fundamental differences that make clustering methods not applicable to districting problems. 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 five different areas of application. Part I covers the classical area of political districting, which is followed by commercial and sales territory design in Part II. Part III focuses on districting in the service industry, including public service, education and natural resources. Part IV addresses the important issue of districting in healthcare, and finally Part V covers all other applications of districting. weiterlesen