Planificación Inteligente de Territorios Comerciales bajo Requerimientos de Realineación y Asignación Disjunta

Abstract: Territory design or districting can be defined as the problem of partitioning a set of basic units into clusters or territories. In this paper, we address a commercial territory design problem subject to planning requirements such as multiple territory balancing, compactness, connectivity, disjoint assignment, and similarity with existing plan. Mathematically speaking, this problem is difficult to solve (NP-Hard). A mixed-integer linear programming model is introduced for this problem. Given its complexity, a novel technique based on branch-and-bound and cut generation is proposed for solving the problem. The method is enhanced by several algorithmic strategies. The empirical assessment of the proposed procedure shows its excellent performance by finding optimal and near-optimal solutions to very largescale real-world instances in a few minutes of computational effort.