Variants of Location-Allocation Problems for Public Service Planning

Abstract

This chapter presents some variants of the location-allocation problems (LAPs) with additional criteria for service planning such as partial coverage of service demand, contiguous service areas, and equal service areas. The variants arise in applications such as the selection of facility sites for the “15-minute city”, the delineation of public service areas, and the provision of some emergency services in the COVID-19 pandemic. The criteria are formulated as linear inequalities and thus can be added to the classical LAP models. It is challenging to solve those variants, since LAPs are known to be nondeterministic polynomial time hard (NP-hard), and the new criteria may impose further obstacles to the analytical solution. At the end of the chapter, I discuss possible methods to solve the variants.