Sustainable urban facility location: Minimising noise pollution and network congestion

This paper addresses a multi-objective facility location problem, concerning the location of noise-sensitive and noise-generating facilities in urban environments. To promote sustainable solutions, two main criteria are incorporated within the optimisation model: minimising total noise-threshold violation levels and the total system travel time on the underlying road network. A bi-level formulation is proposed, which is eventually re-formulated into a single-level model. The augmented ε-constraint method is implemented to yield non-dominated solutions. A Benders-Decomposition approach is proposed to handle large instances of the problem. Numerical tests highlight the effectiveness of the proposed solution method in designing the layout of urban regions.