Developing a system for sectorization: An overview

Abstract

Sectorization is the partition of a set or region into smaller parts, taking into account certain objectives. Sectorization problems appear in real-life situations, such as school or health districting, logistic planning, maintenance operations or transportation. The diversity of applications, the complexity of the problems and the difficulty in finding good solutions warrant sectorization as a relevant research area. Decision Support Systems (DSS) are computerised information systems that may provide quick solutions to decision-makers and researchers and allow for observing differences between various scenarios. The paper is an overview of the development of a DSS for Sectorization, its extent, architecture, implementation steps and benefits. It constitutes a quite general system, for it handles various types of problems, which the authors grouped as (i) basic sectorization problems; (ii) sectorization problems with service centres; (iii) re-sectorization problems; and (iv) dynamic sectorization problems. The new DSS is expected to facilitate the resolution of various practitioners’ problems and support researchers, academics and students in sectorization.