[GIS] Seeking tools for regionalization/redistricting

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I am looking for tools for regionalization / districting in GIS.

So far I have been able to identify

• Districting ArcGIS extension (now also online)
• REDCAP (currently limited to 50k input polygons)
• iRedistrict (not yet released)
• R method

Is there anything else available out there? Especially something that will have no problems in dealing with quite large dataset [~ 1.3 million polygons]?

Answer 1

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Follow-up with some other non-commercial web apps people have been developing:

• Florida is rolling their own MyDistrictBuilder web ap: http://www.floridaredistricting.org/ (app may be at http://floridaredistricting.cloudapp.net/MyDistrictBuilder.aspx, website claims they'll have public testing in March)

• Profs. Altman and McDonald are developing the open-source DistrictBuilder: http://www.publicmapping.org/ (demo at https://demo.publicmapping.org/)

• Something else from the Fuzzy Tolerance blog: http://fuzzytolerance.info/code/lightweight-redistricting-with-openlayers-part-ii/ (demo here: http://maps.co.mecklenburg.nc.us/redistricting/)

The open software TerraView (http://www.dpi.inpe.br/terraview_eng/index.php) has a regionalization method called SKATER. It's description can be found here:

Assunção, Renato M., et al. "Efficient regionalization techniques for socio‐economic geographical units using minimum spanning trees." International Journal of Geographical Information Science 20.7 (2006): 797-811. Available at: http://www.dpi.inpe.br/gilberto/papers/assuncao_neves_camara_ijgis.pdf

The same method is also available in Python package regionskate (pypi, github).

Python's PySAL library supports regionalization. It uses the max-p algorithm that does not force the user to specify a priori the number of regions (which is often the case in other methods).

David Martin's (University of Southampton) AZTool is another option. Software has a solid methodology behind it and I presume it can handle large datasets since it has been used:

... by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to create the 2001 Census output geographies for England and Wales

NCRM has some online learning resources that cover the topic.