Facility location under demand uncertainty: Response to a large-scale bio-terror attack

Pavankumar Murali, Fernando Ordóñez and Maged M. Dessouky

Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 2012, vol. 46, issue 1, 78-87

Abstract: In the event of a catastrophic bio-terror attack, major urban centers need to efficiently distribute large amounts of medicine to the population. In this paper, we consider a facility location problem to determine the points in a large city where medicine should be handed out to the population. We consider locating capacitated facilities in order to maximize coverage, taking into account a distance-dependent coverage function and demand uncertainty. We formulate a special case of the maximal covering location problem (MCLP) with a loss function, to account for the distance-sensitive demand, and chance-constraints to address the demand uncertainty. This model decides the locations to open, and the supplies and demand assigned to each location. We solve this problem with a locate-allocate heuristic. We illustrate the use of the model by solving a case study of locating facilities to address a large-scale emergency of a hypothetical anthrax attack in Los Angeles County.

Keywords: Capacitated facility location; Distance-dependent coverage; Demand uncertainty; Emergency response; Locate-allocate heuristic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceps:v:46:y:2012:i:1:p:78-87

DOI: 10.1016/j.seps.2011.09.001

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