The location of ambivalent facilities: Use of a quadratic zero-one programming algorithm

Ambivalent facilities are defined here as facilities that have undesirable or obnoxious properties, such as the generation of noise or pollution, in addition to the desirable properties for which they were chosen. The problem studied is that of finding the site or sites on a discrete set of rectangular grid positions for a small number of these facilities (which need not all be of the same type) among other facilities that are sensitive to the undesirable properties. The criterion used is that of maximizing the minimum Euclidean distance between any ambivalent-sensitive pair. The existence of exclusion zones and the possible requirement of a minimum tolerable distance between facilities are easily modelled. An original, data-structured computer implementation of Hansen’s quadratic zero-one programming algorithm has successfully been used to solve a series of test problems containing up to 100-200 sensitive locations with grid resolutions up to 1023×1023. The results are reported here.