LOCATION-ALLOCATION MODELS AS DECISION AIDS IN DELINEATING ADMINISTRATIVE REGIONS

This paper presents a model that can be used as a tool in a spatial de cision support system to help decision-makers analyze administrative r egionalization problems in which efficiency in the provision of servic es and uniformity of regions are the main decision criteria. Efficienc y is measured by savings in transportation costs, and regional uniform ity is determined by applying multivariate statistical techniques to t he physical, social, and economic characteristics of a study area. The problem is formulated as an extended version of the p-median model. N oncontiguous regions, which arise when an ordinary location-allocation algorithm is used to solve this problem, are avoided by modifying the algorithm to restrict the allocation of spatial units to regional cen ters only if regional contiguity is preserved Using these criteria, ad ministrative regions are delineated in a case study for Greece. A sens itivity analysis is performed to examine how the values of each object ive and the spatial configuration of regions change as the parameters of the model take different values.