Combining Adjacent Polygons to create most compact service areas

[markpooley]

I'm working to create compact service areas for a research project using contiguous polygons. Basically, I need to identify a number of seeds randomly (say 15), then create a "do while" loop to start combining all the polygons to create the most compactness (perimeter of new polygon divided by area). So, the seed could be joined/dissolved to an adjacent polygon, but it should start with the the adjacent polygons that result in the most compact area.

[DaleHoneycutt]

Here is a thread about this : http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/96992-Creating-polygons-based-on-values-of-other-polygons.

Your problem is similar, but you have the additional constraint of compactness (is this for voter redistricting? If so, see http://www.esri.com/software/redistricting/.

[markpooley]

I was able to figure this problem out, but neglected to follow up.  I finally pushed the code to a public repository so others can use it.

Code here