Discrete cooperative covering problems

A family of discrete cooperative covering problems is analysed in this paper. Each facility emits a signal that decays by the distance and each demand point observes the total signal emitted by all facilities. A demand point is covered if its cumulative signal exceeds a given threshold. We wish to maximize coverage by selecting locations for p facilities from a given set of potential sites. Two other problems that can be solved by the max‐cover approach are the equivalents to set covering and p‐centre problems. The problems are formulated, analysed and solved on networks. Optimal and heuristic algorithms are proposed and extensive computational experiments reported.