LOCATING AN OBNOXIOUS FACILITY ON A EUCLIDEAN NETWORK TO MINIMIZE NEIGHBORHOOD DAMAGE

This paper considers the problem of locating an obnoxious facility on a Euclidean network that could inflict damage within a lambda distance of its location point. The objective is to find a location point that minimizes the sum of weights within the circle of radius lambda cente red at the location point, where each weight (assigned to a point on t he network) represents a numerical scale that typically signifies the extent of the undesirability (or the damage cost) due to the facility located near the weighted point. The weights are assumed discretely di stributed over all the nodes but uniformly distributed on all the link s of the network. In the problem analysis, some optimal solution prope rties are found, e.g., the objective function is lower semicontinuous piecewise concave and there is at least one optimal location point in a finite set of candidate points. Using these properties, an efficient solution algorithm is derived and tested with several numerical probl ems. (C) 1994 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.