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iGLASS: An Open Source SDSS for Public School Location-Allocation

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GeoComputational Analysis and Modeling of Regional Systems

Part of the book series: Advances in Geographic Information Science ((AGIS))

Abstract

School location problems are notoriously wicked to tackle due to the multiplicity of actors involved, the emotional value of a child’s education, and the sheer number of conflicting objectives and constraints. School capacity constraints are particularly challenging because they may well invalidate the desirable property that students be assigned to their closest school. In this chapter, we present a new multi-objective problem formulated as a capacitated p-median model that explicitly addresses this point, as well as assignment of students to schools deemed excessively distant. We also propose a two-phase heuristic algorithm where Tabu Search solves the location portion of the problem, while Greedy/Genetic Algorithms solve the student allocation problem, following by a local post-optimization phase. This process is supplemented by a step of spatially local re-optimization. The model is implemented as a tightly-coupled spatial decision support system called the interactive Graphical Location-Allocation School System (iGLASS), which is built on an open-source GIS software platform. We test the location planning system on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) system in Charlotte, North Carolina. Overall, our two + one-phase heuristic exhibits a performance close to that of a commercial solver (CPLEX), but requires a much lower computational effort. It is scalable, interactive and offers the opportunity to evaluation a large variety of solutions. The proposed model is beneficial to policy-makers seeking to improve the provision and efficiency of public services. The portability of the interface and the interactive features of the SDSS make it applicable to other location-allocation problems.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Renaissance Computing Institute of North Carolina for funding this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, 28223, USA

    Min Chen, Jean-Claude Thill & Eric Delmelle

Authors
  1. Min Chen
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  2. Jean-Claude Thill
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  3. Eric Delmelle
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jean-Claude Thill .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA

    Jean-Claude Thill

  2. Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

    Suzana Dragicevic

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Chen, M., Thill, JC., Delmelle, E. (2018). iGLASS: An Open Source SDSS for Public School Location-Allocation. In: Thill, JC., Dragicevic, S. (eds) GeoComputational Analysis and Modeling of Regional Systems. Advances in Geographic Information Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59511-5_17

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