Location and allocation of service units on a congested network

Abstract

We consider the problem of locating facilities and allocating servers on a congested network (LASCN). Demands for service that originate from the nodes are assumed to be Poisson distributed and the servers provide a service time that is exponentially distributed. The objective is to minimize the total cost of the system which includes a fixed installation cost, a variable server cost, a cost associated with travel time and a cost associated with the waiting time in the facility for all the customers. The problem is formulated using non-linear programming and subsequently analyzed. Results for exact and approximate solution approaches are reported. We also show that we can modify the approaches to solve the LASCN with constraints limiting both the travel time to the servers and the waiting time of customers.