Physica Facility Location: Concepts, Models, Algorithms and Case Studies (Contributions to Management Science)

The mathematical science of facility locating has attracted much attention in d- crete and continuous optimization over nearly last four decades. Investigators have focused on both algorithms and formulations in diverse settings in both the private sectors (e.g., industrial plants, banks, retail facilities, etc.) and the public sectors (e.g., hospitals, post stations, etc.). Facility location problems locate a set of facilities (resources) to minimize the cost ofsatisfying someset ofdemands(ofthecustomers)with respectto some set of constraints. Facility location decisions are critical elements in strategic planning for awiderangeofprivateandpublic?rms.Thebranchesoflocatingfacilities arebroad and long-lasting, in?uencing numerous operational and logistical decisions. High costs associated with property acquisition and facility construction make facility location or relocation projects long-term investments. Decision makers must select sites that will not only perform well according to the current system state, but also willcontinuetobepro?tableforthefacility'slifetime,evenas environmentalfactors change,populationsshift,andmarkettrendsevolve.Findingrobustfacilitylocations is thus a dif?cult task, demanding decision makers to account for uncertain future events. Locationscience is an areaof analyticalstudythat can be tracedbackto Pierrede Fermat, Evagelistica Torricelli (a student of Galileo), and Battista Cavallieri. Each one independently proposed (and some say solved) the basic Euclidean spatial - dian problem early in the seventeenth century. Review From the reviews:“The volume under discussion … is quite different from the other publications as it deals exclusively with location analysis. … I consider the book to be an outstanding one which organizes the vast amount of literature concerning location-allocation analysis in an excellent way, thereby providing a comprehensive overview of the state of the art. … an ideal starting point for those who are already engaged in location-allocation analysis and who are interested in getting a first insight into one of the advanced topics addressed.” (Gert W. Wolf, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, March, 2011) From the Back Cover This book deals with location problems. Location problems establish a set of facilities (resources) to minimize the cost of satisfying a set of demands (customers) with respect to a set of constraints. There are four components that describe location problems: customers, who are assumed to be already located at points or on routes, facilities that will be located, a space in which customers and facilities are located, and a metric that indicates geographical and chronological distances between customers and facilities. This book describes these parts in each specific location model. Location models are used in a variety of applications such as locating warehouses within a supply chain to minimize the average time to market, locating noxious material to maximize its distance to the public, etc. In this book, readers can find these applications exemplified by real-world cases for each particular model. The relationship between location problems and other areas such as supply chains is also considered here.