iRedistrict® Online

iRedistrict® is an award-winning redistricting software with powerful optimization algorithms, intuitive user controls, easy editing interface, and customizable reporting. The development of this technology was sponsored by National Science Foundation.

As a cost-effective and time-saving solution, iRedistrict® can dramatically save the workload and improve the outcome quality of redistricting projects. iRedistrict® excels in its capability to leverage user inputs (such as communities of interests, existing boundaries, etc.) and powerful computer algorithms, which can generate high-quality redistricting plans that meet both mandatory requirements and user-specified preferences.

iRedistrict® has online edition and desktop edition.

• Cross-platform support for Windows, Mac and Linux
• Easy to use, even for non-technical people
• Powerful algorithms to optimize multiple objectives
• Automatically generate redistricting plans while also allowing manual editing
• Achieve population equality
• Achieve geographical contiguity and compactness
• Preserve user-specific COI (communities of interest)
• Preserve Majority-Minority Zone
• Minimize crossing of existing boundaries
• Support the editing of the plans
• Support locking of some districts and recalculate remaining district boundaries
• Compare/evaluate multiple plans with ranking and visualization
• Collaboratively create plans with a group of users or the public
• Share, vote and comment on the plans with a group of users or the public
• Produce customized report
• Export redistricting plans to ESRI shapefiles and Block Equivalence File
• Save project workspace and share with others

Does iRedistrict support starting from an existing plan

Yes, with iRedistrict, you can load an existing plan as a boundary, then ask the software to produce plans minimizing the cross of this boundary. It supports working with multiple boundaries. That menas, you can minimize the cross of an exiting plan and also administrative boundaries.

How can iRedistrict produce 0-deviation plan?

One solution is to set higher weight and very low threshold on population equality before running the optimization. After producing the plans, lock the districts that have 0-deviation and rerun the redistricting optimization. Repeat it several times, you will get 0-deviation plans. Another solution is to fine tune the plan boundaries. Pick a plan and mix it with the block layer to produce a polygon file that has blocks around the plan boundaries. Then run redistricting optimization on this file. Repeat the first solution if necessary.