Multiobjective analysis of facility location decisions

The study of facility siting decisions has a long and extensive history. As this area of research has evolved, there has been increasing recognition that the complexity of these problems is such that they often have more than one objective. For this paper, the authors reviewed the broad and multidisciplinary literature of location analysis to uncover the scope of research that has examined the multiobjective aspects of this problem domain. In all, 45 papers were found in a total of 20 journals. Four broad categories of objectives were uncovered. The largest category was, not unexpectedly, cost minimization, which included distance minimization. The second most common category was for demand-oriented objectives which included demand coverage and demand assignment. Only about ten percent of the articles included objectives in either of the last two categories. Profit maximization was one of these while objectives addressing environmental concerns comprise the other. Structurally, the models studied typically reflected the general population of single objective location models. That is, quite often they were siting mutiple uncapacitated facilities among a set of discrete, finite location alternatives with deterministic parameters over a single planning period.