AN EFFICIENT ALGORITHM FOR FACILITY LOCATION IN THE PRESENCE OF FORBIDDEN REGIONS

This paper investigates a constrained form of the classical Weber prob lem. Specifically, we consider the problem of locating a new facility in the presence of convex polygonal forbidden regions such that the su m of the weighted distances from the new facility to n existing facili ties is minimized. It is assumed that a forbidden region is an area in the plane where travel and facility location are not permitted and th at distance is measured using the Euclidean-distance metric. A solutio n procedure for this nonconvex programming problem is presented. It is shown that by iteratively solving a series of unconstrained problems, this procedure terminates at a local optimum to the original constrai ned problem. Numerical examples are presented.