Location of a semi-obnoxious facility with elliptic maximin and network minisum objectives

This paper considers the problem of locating a single semi-obnoxious facility on a general network, so as to minimize the total transportation cost between the new facility and the demand points (minisum), and at the same time to minimize the undesirable effects of the new facility by maximizing its distance from the closest population center (maximin). The two objectives employ different distance metrics to reflect reality. Since vehicles move on the transportation network, the shortest path distance is suitable for the minisum objective. For the maximin objective, however, the elliptic distance metric is used to reflect the impact of wind in the distribution of pollution. An efficient algorithm is developed to find the nondominated set of the bi-objective model and is implemented on a numerical example. A simulation experiment is provided to find the average computational complexity of the algorithm.

► We model the location of a semi-obnoxious facility on a network with mixed metrics. ► Two objectives are optimized: elliptic maximin on the plane and network minisum. ► The efficient set is derived by network redefinition, elimination and construction. ► The algorithm eliminated 69–97% of redefined edges in computational experiments. ► The algorithm’s average complexity is polynomial in the problem parameters.