• Evaluate workload by region and recommend new configurations with equal workloads.
• Provide the necessary logic for accommodating physical features (such as river and major highways) and political boundaries (such as incorporated towns and school districts).
• Provide the ability to evaluate trends, calls for service, crime patterns and workload statistics in order to better plan future facilities.
• Provide means of manually adjusting and refining the model.
• Functionality for creating presentation quality maps and reports needed for community meetings.
• Facilities for acceptance of input data from Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) Systems.
• Facilities for output of files depicting new boundary configurations for use in a CAD System.
• Functionality for update of street Centerline files with left and right side boundary configurations.

At the core of the system is an automated redistricting engine designed to create balanced regions using input from either point data depicting individual police calls for service or polygons depicting street blocks or other agency specific reporting areas where base workload data is collected. The user starts the process by selecting the number of months used for calculation of the workload. Next, the number of districts desired, the target workload for each district and an approximate location for the center point of each district are entered.  Center points can also represent location of existing facilities such as Police Stations or temporary sub-stations.

The redistricting engine then using a specialized algorithm reallocates the individual sub polygons until a balanced condition has been achieved. Safeguards have been built to insure the model does not enter an endless cycle of transactions and that each transaction is accepted only if it results in reduction of the total error in the model.

Users can also manually edit the district configurations created by the automated model or simply enter their existing district and/or beat configurations and use the manual tools to make adjustments. 

autoBound Police Interface

automated model