2022/11/22 by Ali Kaan Kurbanzade, Kurbanzade, Ali Kaan, Julia Gaudio +1
Business, Management and Accounting · Engineering · #Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics #FOS: Mathematics #Facility Location and Emergency Management #Optimization and Control (math.OC) #Vehicle Routing Optimization Methods
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2211.12587
openalex publication_date 2022/11/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In typical applications of facility location problems, the location of demand is assumed to be an input to the problem. The demand may be fixed or dynamic, but ultimately outside the optimizers control. In contrast, there are settings, especially in humanitarian contexts, in which the optimizer decides where to locate a demand node. In this work, we introduce an optimization framework for joint facility and demand location. As examples of our general framework, we extend the well-known k-median and k-center problems into joint facility and demand location problems (JFDLP) and formulate them as integer programs. We propose a local search heuristic based on network flow. We apply our heuristic to a hurricane evacuation response case study. Our results demonstrate the challenging nature of these simultaneous optimization problems, especially when there are many potential locations. The local search heuristic is most promising when the the number of potential locations is large, while the number of facility and demand nodes to be located is small.