Deterministic flow-demand location problems

Abstract

In flow-covering (interception) models the focus is on the demand for service that originates from customers travelling in the network (not for the purpose of obtaining the service). In contrast, in traditional location models a central assumption is that the demand for service comes from customers residing at nodes of the network. In this paper we combine these two types of models. The paper presents four new problems. Two of the four deal with the problem of locating m facilities so as to maximize the total number of potential customers covered by the facilities (where coverage does not necessarily imply the actual consumption of service). In the two other problems the attention is directed to the consumption of service and thus the criteria is to maximize (minimize) the number of actual users (distance travelled). It is shown in the paper that all four problems have similar structure to other known location problems.