Facility Location

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. This book deals with location problems. It considers the relationship between location problems and other areas such as supply chains.

Facility location theory develops the idea of locating one or more facilities by optimizing suitable criteria such as minimizing transportation cost, or capturing the largest market share. The contributions in this book focus an approach to facility location theory through game theoretical tools highlighting situations where a location decision is faced by several decision makers and leading to a game theoretical framework in non-cooperative and cooperative methods. Models and methods regarding the facility location via game theory are explored and applications are illustrated through economics, engineering, and physics. Mathematicians, engineers, economists and computer scientists working in theory, applications and computational aspects of facility location problems using game theory will find this book useful.

An introduction to pragmatic methods for solving complex problems in facilities location: choosing from among known feasible sites or a broad range described as an area, placing facilities, and assigning customers. It emphasizes careful location and customer allocation to determine optimum use of time and cost - improving flow of materials and services and reducing the need for duplication or construction redundancies.

This text develops the mathematical implications of barriers to the geometrical and analytical characteristics of continuous location problems. The book will appeal to those working in operations research and management science, and mathematicians interested in optimization theory and its applications.

The design and location of production facilities are important aspects of corporate strategy which can have a significant impact on the socio economy of nations and regions. Here, these decisions are recognized as being interrelated; that is, the optimal plant design (input mix and output level) depends on the location of the plant, and the optimal location of the plant depends on the design of the plant. Until the late 1950s, however, the questions of where a firm should locate its plant and what should be its planned input mix and output level were treated, for the most part, as separate questions, and were investigated by different groups of research ers. Although there was some recognition that these questions are inter I 1928; Hoover 1948; Isard 1956], no detailed analysis related [e. g. , Pre doh or formal structure was developed combining these two problems until the work of Moses [1958]. In recent years scholarly interest in the integrated production/locaton decision has been increasing rapidly. At the same time that research on the integrated production/location problem was expanding, significant related work was occurring in the fields of operations research, transportation science, industrial engineering, eco nomics, and geography. Unfortunately, the regional scientists working on the production/location problem had little contact with researchers in other fields. They generally publish in different journals and attend dif ferent professional meetings. Consequently, little of the recent work in these fields has made its way into the production/location research and vice versa.

The book covers both theory and applications of locational analysis (LocAn). The reader will see the power of LocAn models in various real-world contexts, varying from communication design to robotics and mail delivery. It is divided into two parts. The first part contains an overview of some of the LocAn methodologies. The second part describes in thorough detail some selected applications. The text provides researchers with an excellent and well thought-out review of available location models.

TRB's National Freight Cooperative Research Program (NFCRP) Report 13: Freight Facility Location Selection: A Guide for Public Officials describes the key criteria that the private sector considers when making decisions on where to build new logistics facilities. A final report that provides background material used in the development of NFCRP Report 13 has been published as NCFRP Web-Only Document 1: Background Research Material for Freight Facility Location Selection: A Guide for Public Officials (NCFRP Report 13).