The facility and transfer points location problem

In this paper, we investigate the location of a facility and several transfer points to serve as collector points for customers who need the services of the facility. For example, demand for emergency services is generated at a set of demand points that need the services of a central facility (such as a hospital). Patients are transferred to a helicopter pad (transfer point) at normal speed, and from there they are transferred to the facility at increased speed. The model involves the location of multiple transfer points and one facility. Locating one transfer point when the set of demand points and the location of the facility are known was investigated by Berman et al. Location of several transfer points when the location of the facility is given was investigated by Berman et al. In this paper, we propose heuristic approaches for the solution of this problem and report computational experiments on a test set of 40 problems.