Modeling Gravity Based Equitable Location Problem on Network and Solving by an Efficient Heuristic Method

Abstract

This paper introduces a new concept in location problems, called "Gravity-Based Equitable Location Problem". Equity is seeking for a fair distribution of demands or balancing the facility capacity to meet demands, so that the customers select them by appropriate criteria like the gravity law. The objective function defined as minimizing the maximum of facilities workload and deployment and movement costs regarding to the gravity model. Then, a heuristic algorithm designed by a problem structure and comparative analysis accomplished with the exact method on appropriate numerical examples. The proposed algorithm yields near optimal solutions for randomly generated examples. Results show that it is very efficient, with the mean difference of approximately 6 percent and acceptable computational time.