THE COHERENT COVERING LOCATION PROBLEM

In a location-allocation system, it is necessary to obtain not only an efficient set of facility locations, but also an efficient relationsh ip among the catchment areas. This is especially important in services that are hierarchical in nature and where there is a strong relations hip between the different levels. In seeking an effective relation amo ng the different levels, all the areas assigned to a particular facili ty at one hierarchical level should belong to one and the same distric t in the next level. This property leads to a ''coherent'' districting structure. In this paper the concept of coherence is introduced withi n a network location covering framework: the Coherent Covering Locatio n Problem locates two hierarchical facility levels by maximizing the c overage while ensuring coherence. Adaptations of the model to differen t location patterns and computational experience are provided.