Redistricting practitioners must balance many competing constraints and criteria when drawing district boundaries. To aid in this process, researchers have developed many methods for optimizing districting plans according to one or more criteria. This research note extends a recently-proposed single-criterion optimization method, short bursts (Cannon et al., 2023), to handle the multi-criterion case, and in doing so approximate the Pareto frontier for any set of constraints. We study the empirical performance of the method in a realistic setting and find it behaves as expected and is not very sensitive to algorithmic parameters. The proposed approach, which is implemented in open-source software, should allow researchers and practitioners to better understand the tradeoffs inherent to the redistricting process.
翻译:重划实践者在划定选区边界时必须平衡众多的竞争性约束和标准。为了辅助这一过程,研究者已经开发出许多方法,用于根据一个或多个标准来优化选区规划。本研究笔记将最近提出的单一标准优化方法——短期爆发(Cannon等,2023)——扩展到处理多标准情况,从而近似于任何约束集的帕累托前沿。我们在现实情景中研究了该方法的实证表现,并发现它的行为符合预期,且不太敏感于算法参数。所提出的方法已在开源软件中实现,应能使研究者和实践者更好地理解重划过程中固有的权衡。