Police patrol district design using agent-based simulation and GIS

Police patrols play an important role in public safety. The patrol district design is an important factor affecting the patrol performances, such as average response time and workload variation. The redistricting procedure can be described as partitioning smaller geographical units into several larger districts with the constraints of contiguity and compactness. The size of the possible sample space is large and the corresponding graph-partitioning problem is NP-complete. In our approach, the patrol districting plans generated by a parameterized redistricting procedure are evaluated using an agent-based simulation model we implemented in Java Repast in a geographic information system (GIS) environment. The relationship between districting parameters and response variables is studied and better districting plans can be generated. After in-depth evaluations of these plans, we perform a Pareto analysis of the outputs from the simulation to find the non-dominated set of plans on each of the objectives. This paper also includes a case study for the police department of Charlottesville, VA, USA. Simulation results show that patrol performance can be improved compared with the current districting solution.