Congress seat allocation using mathematical optimization

Roland Oliver Hales () and Sergio García ()
Additional contact information
Roland Oliver Hales: University of Edinburgh
Sergio García: University of Edinburgh

TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, 2019, vol. 27, issue 3, No 7, 426-455

Abstract: Abstract After the 2015 Spanish general election a row erupted over the allocation of physical seats in the Congress of Deputies, with certain parties left feeling they possessed an inferior selection of seats compared to other parties. Using this as motivation, this paper considers how mathematical optimization can be used to generate seating plans for political chambers, an application that has not been considered before. As well as being in some way ‘fair’ to all parties, the seating plan should ensure that each block of seats is well-defined and compact. Two optimization models are formulated and, due to their complexity, heuristic methods are developed to find ‘good’ solutions. Analysis shows that the heuristics are able to produce visually appealing seating plans for basic cases, but problems can occur when there are additional requirements to be satisfied.

Keywords: Seat allocation; Mixed integer programming; 90C11 Mixed integer programming; 90C27 Combinatorial optimization; 90C90 Applications of mathematical programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11750-019-00515-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:topjnl:v:27:y:2019:i:3:d:10.1007_s11750-019-00515-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://link.springer.de/orders.htm

DOI: 10.1007/s11750-019-00515-3

Access Statistics for this article

TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research is currently edited by Juan José Salazar González and Gustavo Bergantiños

More articles in TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research from Springer, Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().