Modelling pollution spread

The problem of locating facilities causing airborne pollution on the plane has already received considerable attention. The decisive input in related models is a set of meteorological parameters (4 or 8 main wind velocities and frequencies). When a detailed representation of meteorological conditions is carried out by the related models (e.g. more than 8 winds), e.g. via simulation, then the existing optimal solution methods collapse due mainly to two reasons: Difficulties in extending (generalizing) the existing theoretical background to cope with the optimization techniques requirements when more than 8 winds are present in the model. The extreme amount of computational effort required to solve models carrying out a reasonably accurate representation of reality. On the other hand, the location of obnoxious facilities on a network has received little attention although related models could describe many real-life problems: establishing chemical plants near a road or rail network, nuclear plants near canal or river networks etc. In this paper the authors propose a method to optimally solve the problem of locating facilities causing airborne pollution in a network. The main characteristic of the model proposed is that it can approximate reality at any desired accuracy level.