Covering location problems

Sergio Garcia Quiles, Alfredo Marin

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter (peer-reviewed)peer-review

Abstract

When deciding where to locate facilities (e.g., emergency points where an ambulance will wait for a call) that provide a service, it happens quite often that a customer (e.g., a person) can receive this service only if he/she is under a certain distance to the closest facility (e.g., the ambulance can arrive in less than 7 min at this person’s home). The problems that share this property receive the name of covering problems and have many applications (analysis of markets, archaeology, crew scheduling, emergency services, metallurgy, nature reserve selection, etc.). This chapter surveys the Set Covering Problem, the Maximal Covering Location Problem, and related problems and introduces a general model that has as particular cases the main covering location models. The main theoretical results in this topic as well as exact and heuristic algorithms are reviewed. A Lagrangian approach to solve the general model is detailed and, although the emphasis is on discrete models, some information on continuous covering is provided at the end of the chapter.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLocation Science
EditorsGilbert Laporte, Stefan Nickel, Francisco Saldanha
PublisherSpringer
Pages93-114
Number of pages21
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-319-13111-5
ISBN (Print)978-3-319-13110-8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2015

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