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
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 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
4
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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