Im Rahmen des PRIME (Paderborn Research Colloquium on Information Management & Engineering) begrüßt das Department Wirtschaftsinformatik Prof. Dr. Marco Lübbecke (RWTH Aachen). Wir laden alle Interessierten zu seinem Vortrag "(Who wants) Political Re-Districting in Germany (?)" ein.
Marco Lübbecke is a full professor and chair of operations research at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. He received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from TU Braunschweig in 2001 and held positions as assistant professor for combinatorial optimization and graph algorithms at TU Berlin and as visiting professor for discrete optimization at TU Darmstadt.
Marco's research and teaching interests are in computational integer programming and discrete optimization, covering the entire spectrum from fundamental research and methods development to industry scale applications. A particular focus of his work is on decomposition approaches to exactly solving large-scale real-world optimization problems. This touches on mathematics, computer science, business, and engineering alike and rings with his appreciation for fascinating interdisciplinary challenges.
Abstract: The design, and in particular the re-design of electoral districts is a regular task in preparation for elections. Each district should contain the same number of voters (within tolerances), so population shifts often trigger this re-design, enforced and restricted by laws and rules. The general task is similar in different countries, but we focus on the case of federal elections in Germany. We present a tool that provides the (current standard of) descriptive analytics for supporting the decision maker. More importantly, we offer prescriptive analytics to suggest an optimal (re-)districting. This is based on integer programming optimization models and algorithms which is why the tool is flexible enough to be rather easily adapted to different elections and different countries. We take into account that there are several conflicting objectives and we in fact face a multi-criteria optimization problem. We discuss the entire analytics process, from the idea, data gathering, convincing officials, model and algorithm development to implementation and what decision makers have to say about this tool. We will not discuss any political implications (at least not during the talk).
