Routing and Logistics with TransCAD

Partitioning and Clustering

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Introduction

You need to design legislative districts within a state. Each district is composed of a number of Census blocks, and you need to balance the voting age population of each one. You need to group retail sites into sets of equal demand so that each grouping can be serviced from a single supply center. After determining an appropriate grouping you will assign each retail center to a supply center and run a routing procedure. You need to develop marketing regions for a large company. You want the number of stores in each region to be about the same.
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Introduction
You use regional partitioning when you want to create compact and balanced areas that are composed of smaller geographic areas. You use clustering when you want to create groupings of features in a point or area layer based on the distance or travel cost between them, with or without capacity restriction. Note that the two procedures use different algorithms and constraints, therefore they generally produce different solutions on the same area layer.

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Differences

Partitioning

Clustering

Can be used only on area features Requires you to specify a seed for each district Can create balanced groups with no capacity restriction Always creates contiguous groups

Can be used on point or area features Dose not require you to specify seeds Can crate balanced groups with a capacity restriction May crate groups that are not contiguous
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Guidelines
If you are working with point features, you must use clustering If you need a capacity restriction, use clustering If you require contiguous areas, use regional partitioning If you want to be able to specify seed locations by yourself, use the regional partitioning

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About Regional Partitioning

You need to design sales territories that cover the continental US, where each territory is a combination of several states, and the number of customers in each territory is about the same You need to design legislative districts within a state, where each district is composed of a number of Census blocks, and the voting age population of each district is about the same

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About Regional Partitioning

The only requirements for seed locations are:

You must choose one seed for each district that you want to create The seed zones must be included in the input set of zones for partitioning The seed zones must not be islands (If you choose to include islands, the partitioning procedure will assign island zones to districts by finding the nearest non-island feature, and assigning the island to the same zone as that other feature.)
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Solving a Regional Partitioning Problem

Open or create a map containing the are layer to be partitioned Create or open an adjacency matrix file that contains information on the spatial relationship between the zones Create a selection set of seed zones

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To Create an Adjacency Matrix File for Partitioning

Area layer

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To Solve the Regional Partitioning Problem (REGIONAL.WRK)

If you have not already done so, open or create a map containing the area layer you want to partition and open or create an adjacency matrix. If your partition requires specific seed zones, create a selection set of the seed zones.

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To Automatically Generate Seeds

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About Clustering

You want to assign customers to salespeople. Since each salesperson has to travel frequently from on customer site to another, you want each group of customers to be compact. There are also limits on the number of customers each salesperson can handle. You want to create groups of users of a telecommunications service, with the long-term goal of finding good transmitter locations. You manage a fleet of moving vans that pick up and deliver household goods. You want to cluster the households to reduce the distance traveled by each van. The vans are limited in the quantity of goods that they can carry.
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Specifying a Cluster Capacity

The clustering procedure lets you specify a maximum cluster size or cluster capacity, which limits the number of features assigned to each cluster.

When creating service territories for ZIP Codes, the size for each ZIP Code could be the number of service calls that are made in that ZIP Code. The clusters would have a maximum number of service calls. When creating delivery zones, the size for each customer could be the volume of product to be delivered. The clusters would have a maximum volume.
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Specifying a Cluster Capacity

When there are limits on cluster capacity, it is possible for the clustering procedure to produce clusters that overlap.

The features nearest to a cluster are too large in size to be assigned to the cluster, and are therefore assigned to a different cluster. Some feature or features located further away from the cluster in question are smaller in size, and can therefore be assigned to the cluster without exceeding the capacity
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To Create Clusters
Choose the layer and selection set of features to cluster Identify the number of clusters to create Prepare a cost matrix indicating the distance or travel time between each pair of features The cost matrix file must contain the distance, time, or other travel costs between the features to be clustered. The cost matrix can be built using the Routing/Logistics-Cost Matrix command.

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To Create Clusters
If you have not already done so, open or create a map containing the features to be clustered and open or create a cost matrix.

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