A new model for the alignment of almost balanced sales territories

The sales territory alignment problem deals with the question of how to align a number of sales coverage units (usually zip-codes or political districts) to sales territories. These sales territories are usually aligned in a way that they are almost balanced relative to one or several attributes like, e.g. potential or work-load. To support this task of the sales manager, a number of models have been proposed. Nevertheless, all of these models suffer from one of the following shortcomings: either, they do not guarantee the values of the chosen balancing attributes to be within certain lower and upper bounds, or the specification of these lower and upper bounds is left to the sales manager. Therefore, we propose a model called EQUALIZER that avoids these shortcomings by determining almost balanced territories without requiring lower and upper bounds from the sales manager and furthermore ensuring contiguous sales territories. In order to motivate EQUALIZER, we compare different models on a small set of instances.