About

Douglas M. King is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the same university, earned in May 2012, along with a Master's degree in Systems and Entrepreneurial Engineering and a Bachelor's degree in General Engineering from the University of Illinois. His research areas include Data Analytics and Operations Research, with a focus on applications such as political redistricting, geographic zoning, and transportation systems. Dr. King has contributed to the development of optimization frameworks and algorithms for analyzing and improving processes related to public policy, transportation, and sports tournament modeling. He has been recognized with awards such as the INFORMS Service Science Best Paper Award and the INFORMS Public Sector Operations Research Best Paper Award, and has been actively involved in professional societies including ASEE, IISE, and INFORMS.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Law
• Mathematical optimization
• Mathematics
• Economics
• Mathematical economics
• Engineering
• Operations research
• Public administration

Selected publications

• Temporal analysis of the clustering and hypothesized social contagion of mass killing events in the United States

  Socio-Economic Planning Sciences · 2025-10-18

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  PublisherDOI

• Finding Shortest Flip Sequences Between Connected Graph Partitions

  INFORMS Journal on Optimization · 2025-12-12

  articleOpen access

  Research story. The idea of finding a “path” between two district plans developed alongside the political redistricting compromise work in Dobbs et al. (2024a). After working with the transfer distance in Dobbs et al. (2024a) and reading about the existence of flip sequences on biconnected graphs in Akitaya et al. (2023), the authors were curious about the relationship between transfer distance and shortest flip sequences. The authors used this relationship to design two algorithms (one exact and one heuristic) that seek a shortest flip sequence between connected graph partitions.

  PublisherDOI

• Finite‐Horizon Behavior of the Periodically Observed Time‐Homogeneous Poisson Process

  Naval Research Logistics (NRL) · 2025-06-13

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT When evaluating whether system arrivals can be characterized as a Poisson process, researchers draw conclusions from observed data. In practice, many systems are observed periodically (e.g., hourly, daily, monthly), which leads to discretization errors in the observed data. The periodically observed time‐homogeneous Poisson process (PTPP) model is an existing framework for capturing the long‐run effect of periodic observation on a Poisson process. This paper extends the PTPP model to capture the behavior of periodically observed Poisson systems over a finite number of events . This paper formulates the ‐step transition probabilities in an infinite‐state PTPP system and uses them to determine the PTPP's mixing time. The PTPP's interarrival distribution and the quality of its arrival rate moment estimator are evaluated as a function of . After extending the PTPP model for finite , the model's applicability is demonstrated through a case study of search‐and‐rescue operations in New York wilderness regions. The results suggest that five regions behave similarly to daily‐observed Poisson processes, which can inform practical resourcing decisions over extended periods (e.g., days, weeks, quarters).

  PublisherDOI

• A framework for analyzing the periodically-observed time-homogeneous Poisson process

  Journal of the Operational Research Society · 2025-03-27 · 2 citations

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• Facilitating Compromise in Redistricting with Transfer Distance Midpoints

  INFORMS Journal on Optimization · 2024-07-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  States in the United States redraw their electoral district boundaries every 10 years. This redistricting process can be contentious and has long-lasting consequences for political representation. To reduce bias in the redistricting process, some states require bipartisan commissions; however, bipartisan commissions can still involve partisan tension if the political parties cannot compromise. We propose an optimization framework to facilitate compromise between two redistricting stakeholders. This framework seeks a midpoint between two stakeholder plans with respect to a distance metric. A midpoint can help the stakeholders visualize a potential compromise that incorporates district structure common to both of their proposed plans. First, we consider multiple distance metrics and evaluate whether midpoints with respect to these metrics are achievable and align with redistricting requirements. Then we formulate a mixed-integer linear program to find a midpoint (or any fractional point) between two given plans with respect to the transfer distance. This formulation incorporates district structure from both given plans by fixing variables; consequently, it is possible to solve some realistically sized instances exactly in reasonable amounts of time. We present experiments on grid instances and Missouri’s congressional redistricting instance to demonstrate how this method can quickly generate compromise options that align with redistricting requirements. Funding: This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program [Grant DGE-1746047]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ijoo.2023.0029 .

  PublisherDOI

• Highly Connected Graph Partitioning: Exact Formulation and Solution Methods

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-06-12

  preprintOpen access

  Graph partitioning (GP) and vertex connectivity have traditionally been two distinct fields of study. This paper introduces the highly connected graph partitioning (HCGP) problem, which partitions a graph into compact, size balanced, and $Q$-(vertex) connected parts for any $Q\geq 1$. This problem is valuable in applications that seek cohesion and fault-tolerance within their parts, such as community detection in social networks and resiliency-focused partitioning of power networks. Existing research in this fundamental interconnection primarily focuses on providing theoretical existence guarantees of highly connected partitions for a limited set of dense graphs, and do not include canonical GP considerations such as size balance and compactness. This paper's key contribution is providing a general modeling and algorithmic approach for HCGP, inspired by recent work in the political districting problem, a special case of HCGP with $Q=1$. This approach models $Q$-connectivity constraints as mixed integer programs for any $Q\geq 1$ and provides an efficient branch-and-cut method to solve HCGP. When solution time is a priority over optimality, this paper provides a heuristic method specifically designed for HCGP with $Q=2$. A computational analysis evaluates these methods using a test bed of instances from various real-world graphs. In this analysis, the branch-and-cut method finds an optimal solution within one hour in $82.8\%$ of the instances solved. For $Q=2$, small and sparse instances are challenging for the heuristic, whereas large and sparse instances are challenging for the exact method. Furthermore, this study quantifies the computational cost of ensuring higher connectivity using the branch-and-cut approach, compared to a baseline of ensuring $1$-connectivity. Overall, this work serves as an effective tool to partition a graph into resilient and cohesive parts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A practical optimization framework for political redistricting: A case study in Arizona

  Socio-Economic Planning Sciences · 2024-02-24 · 2 citations

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• Redistricting optimization with recombination: A local search case study

  Computers & Operations Research · 2023 · 7 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Mathematical optimization
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• An Optimization Case Study in Analyzing Missouri Redistricting

  INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics · 2023 · 7 citations

  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Public administration

  Every 10 years, U.S. states redraw their congressional and state legislative district plans. This process decides the political landscape for the subsequent 10 years. Prior to the 2021 redistricting cycle, Missouri enacted new criteria for state legislative districts. The Missouri League of Women Voters (LWV-MO) contacted the authors to analyze the potential impact of these new criteria on the map-drawing process. We apply recombination (a spanning tree method) within a local search optimization framework to analyze the interplay between political geography, constitutional requirements, and political fairness in Missouri. We use this framework to produce district plans that satisfy the new criteria and prioritize different aspects of fairness. The results, quantified by several measures of fairness, reveal an inherent Republican advantage in Missouri because of the state’s political geography and constitutional requirements. We conclude that Missouri’s political geography and constitutional requirements prevent the optimization framework from substantially improving political fairness in state legislative plans. In contrast, the framework can substantially improve political fairness in Missouri congressional plans, which are not subject to the new requirements. The LWV-MO used this work to advocate for fairness and transparency in their testimonies for the Missouri redistricting commission’s public hearings. History: This paper was refereed. Funding: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program [Grant DGE-1746047]. S. H. Jacobson was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research [Grant FA9550-19-1-0106]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/inte.2022.0037 .

  PublisherDOI

• A Bisection Protocol for Political Redistricting

  INFORMS Journal on Optimization · 2023-07-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  The authors conceived of the bisection protocol during a research meeting discussing recent political redistricting literature, in particular, the I-cut-you-freeze protocol preprint. After establishing the theoretical results for the continuous nongeometric setting, they discussed ways to implement both protocols on real-world data, culminating in the Iowa case study and computational experiments with 17 other states.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sheldon H. Jacobson

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  30 shared

• Ian G. Ludden

  Rose–Hulman Institute of Technology

  6 shared

• Rahul Swamy

  5 shared

• Kiera W. Dobbs

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  4 shared

• Rong Yuan

  Temple University Health System

  4 shared

• Edward C. Sewell

  Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

  3 shared

• Arash Khatibi

  2 shared

• Matthew J. Robbins

  2 shared

Labs

• Industrial & Enterprise Systems EngineeringPI

Awards & honors

• INFORMS Service Science Best Paper Award (2019)
• INFORMS Public Sector Operations Research Best Paper Award (…
• IISE Pritsker Doctoral Dissertation Award (2013)
• INFORMS Innovation in Analytics Award (2012)
• INFORMS Section on Public Programs, Services and Needs (SPPS…