Siting and Sizing of Facilities under Probabilistic Demands

In this paper a discrete location model for non-essential service facilities planning is described, which seeks the number, location, and size of facilities, that maximizes the total expected demand attracted by the facilities. It is assumed that the demand for service is sensitive to the distance from facilities and to their size. It is also assumed that facilities must satisfy a threshold level of demand (facilities are not economically viable below that level). A Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) model is proposed for this problem. A branch-and-bound algorithm is designed for solving this MINLP and its convergence to a global minimum is established. A finite procedure is also introduced to find a feasible solution for the MINLP that reduces the overall search in the binary tree generated by the branch-and-bound Communicated by P.M. Pardalos. This research is supported in part by the National Science Foundation, under Grant Number CMMI-0969169. L.M. Fernandes ( ) Instituto Politécnico de Tomar and Instituto de Telecomunicações, Tomar, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] J.J. Júdice Departamento de Matemática, Universidade de Coimbra and Instituto de Telecomunicações, Coimbra, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] H.D. Sherali Grado Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] A.P. Antunes Departamento de Engenharia Civil, Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal e-mail: [email protected]