Facility Location Problem on Network Based on Group Centrality Measure Considering Cooperation and Competition

Abstract

In this study, we tackle the problem of extracting candidate locations for facilities, such as convenience stores, gas stations, and supermarkets, based on closeness centrality while considering the target city a spatial network. When placing a new facility in a local area, locating it with high accessibility for neighboring residents can attract customers from existing facilities and expand its own trading area. In addition, when there are multiple groups, a location that takes into account both the cooperative and competitive relationships among the groups is required. In this study, we focus on group centrality, which extends the concept of centrality from individual nodes to node groups, and propose group-closeness centrality that considers cooperation and competition. Based on information of the existing facility’s location and its trading area, our method outputs a candidate site of a new facility. From experimental evaluations using actual data, i.e., road networks and location information of convenience stores in four cities, we confirm that the proposed measure can extract different candidate locations for each group in consideration of the positional relationship with nodes belonging to different groups.