Facilities, Locations, Customers: Building Blocks of Location Models. A Survey.

Scaparra, Maria Paola and Scutellà, Maria Grazia (2001) Facilities, Locations, Customers: Building Blocks of Location Models. A Survey. Technical Report del Dipartimento di Informatica . Università di Pisa, Pisa, IT.

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Abstract

As evidenced by the remarkable diversity of real world applications which have been modeled and solved as location problems, the field studying the optimal location of facilities is a very interdisciplinary and broad research area. The purpose of this paper is to fit the large variety of location models within a general unified framework, which arises from the description of the three buildings blocks of location problems, namely: facilities, customers, and locations. We provide evidences of how a particular problem specification can be stated mathematically as an optimization problem by opportunely combining into a compact and workable model the main features that characterize and relate these three elements.

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