Equality measures properties for location problems

The objectives underlying location decisions can be various. Among them, equity objectives have received an increasing attention in recent years, especially in the applications related to the public sector, where fair distributions of accessibility to the services should be guaranteed among users. In the literature a huge number of equality measures have been proposed; then, the problem of selecting the most appropriate one to be adopted in the decision‐making processes is crucial. For this reason, many authors focused on the analysis of properties that equality measures should satisfy in order to be considered suitable. Most of the proposed properties are too general and related solely to the mathematical formulation of the measure itself (i.e., simpleness, impartiality, invariance). Hence, they do not give any indications about the behaviour of such measures in the optimization contexts. In this work, we propose some new properties to be associated to equality measures in order to describe characteristics which may be useful to drive optimization procedures in the search of optimal (or near‐optimal) solutions. To this aim some empirical analyses have been performed in order to understand the typical behavior of remarkable measures in presence of a uniform distribution of demand points in a regular location spaces.