Solving electoral zone design problems with NSGA-II
Antonin Ponsich, Eric Alfredo Rincón-García, Román Anselmo Mora-Gutiérrez, Sergio G. de-los-Cobos Silva, Miguel Ángel Gutiérrez Andrade, Pedro Lara Velázquez · Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion · 2017
The electoral zone design problem consists in redrawing the boundaries of legislative districts for electoral purposes, in such a way that federal or state requirements are fulfilled. In Mexico, both population equality and compactness of the designed districts are considered as two conflicting objective functions. The present work represents the first intent to apply a classical Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (the NSGA-II) to this hard combinatorial problem, whereas the Mexican Federal Electoral Institute has traditionnally used a Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm based on a weighted aggregation function. Despite some convergence troubles, the NSGA-II obtains promising results when compared with the SA algorithm, producing better-distributed solutions over a wider-spread front.