On Locating a Facility to Service Areas within a Network

Abstract

Problems involving the selection of a site in a network at which to locate a facility, such as a station for a security guard force, generally fall into one of two categories, depending upon the nature of the facility to be established. One may be interested in minimizing the maximum travel time from the facility to any node in the network, or one may wish to minimize the sum of the distances from the facility to all the nodes in the network. In this paper problems involving travel time from the facility to areas within the network (that is, collections of points as opposed to individual points) are considered. This generalization of the problems appears not to alter their nature, and similar techniques for solutions can be used.