Covering problems in facility location: A review

In this study, we review the covering problems in facility location. Here, besides a number of reviews on covering problems, a comprehensive review of models, solutions and applications related to the covering problem is presented after Schilling, Jayaraman, and Barkhi (1993). This survey tries to review all aspects of the covering problems by stressing the works after Schilling, Jayaraman, and Barkhi (1993). We first present the covering problems and then investigate solutions and applications. A summary and future works conclude the paper.

► We review around 160 papers on the covering problems in facility location.
► We classify all papers in our own special way in terms of models, solutions and applications.
► We fill a big gap after Schilling et al. (1993) until 2011; they did a very comprehensive review.
► We extract a very detailed future researches list for other researchers in the area.