Problem description

This project focuses on developing decision support tools for the problem of school redistricting. The goal is to assign the students from each geographic region in a county or a school district to a home school at each level (elementary, middle, and high school). We are working with the Howard County Public School System to develop tools that will aid in generating, evaluating, and comparing alternative school assignment plans. Related applications include emergency response planning, urban planning and zoning, robot exploration planning, and political redistricting.

The school assignment plan should ideally satisfy a number of different goals, such as meeting school capacities, balancing socioeconomic and test score distributions at the schools, minimizing busing costs, and allowing students in the "walk area" of a school to attend that home school. Since these objectives are often at odds with each other, finding the best plan is a complex multicriteria optimization problem. It is often desirable to create several alternative plans for consideration; these plans should be qualitatively different - that is, they should represent different tradeoffs among evaluation criteria. Finally, because of the complexity of the problem, it is difficult for users to fully understand these tradeoffs. Therefore, our project also focuses on developing effective visualizations.