Single Facility Location Problems with Barriers

Single Facility Location Problems with Barriers

Springer; 1 edition | October 17, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0387954988 | 216 pages | PDF | 1.32 Mb

Growing transportation costs and tight delivery schedules mean that good located decisions are more crucial than ever in the success or failure of industrial and puplic projects. The development of realistic location models is an essential phase in every locational decision process. Especially when dealing with geometric representations of continuous (planar) location model problems, the goegraphical reality must be incorporated. This text develops the mathematical implications of barriers to the geometrical and analytical characteristics of continuous location problems. Besides their relevance in the application of location theoretic results, location problems with barriers are also very interesting from a mathematical point of view. The nonconvexity of distance measures in the presence of barriers leads to nonconvex optimization problems. Most of the classical methods in continuous location theory rely heaily on the convexity of the objective function and will thus fail in this context. On the other hand, general methods in global optimization capable of treating nonconvex problems ignore the geometric charateristics of the location problems considered.