Location-allocation of facilities in service systems is an essential factor of their performance. One of the considerable situations which less addressed in the relevant literature is to balance service among customers in addition to minimize location-allocation costs. This is an important issue, especially in the public sector. Reviewing the recent researches in this field shows that most of t...

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production is termed as a complex process comprising of time and place factors interations. eficient managers may maximize their commercial profits through the recent mrjrture of the said factors. so plant location is an important ecrzptomk criterion and is applied as a guideline for the profit maximization. one of the salient point in market locatioa k the maximization of emency in national or...

A large number of heuristic search algorithms are available for function optimization. Each of these heuristics, e.g., simulated annealing, genetic algorithms, tabu search, etc., has been shown to be effective at finding good solutions efficiently. However, little work has been directed at determining what are the important problem characteristics for which one algorithm is more efficient than ...

This paper proposes a bi-objective model for the facility location problem under a congestion system. The idea of the model is motivated by applications of locating servers in bank automated teller machines (ATMS), communication networks, and so on. This model can be specifically considered for situations in which fixed service facilities are congested by stochastic demand within queueing frame...

In this paper, we develop a capacitated location-covering model considering interval values for demand and service parameters. We also consider flexibility on distance standard for covering demand nodes by the servers. We use the satisfaction degree to represent the constraint of service capacity. The proposed model belongs to the class of mixed integer programming models. Our model can be redu...

Article history: Received 1 September 2013 Received in revised form 6 May 2014 Accepted 7 May 2014 Available online 20 May 2014