Service allocation equity in location coverage analytics

J Xu, AT Murray, RL Church, R Wei - European Journal of Operational …, 2023 - Elsevier
European Journal of Operational Research, 2023Elsevier
Location covering models are important spatial analytic methods, and have been widely
applied to different facility siting problems in order to support decision making processes. It
is common to observe facilities that have significantly different workloads when traditional
coverage models are relied upon. This can and does impact system efficiency, reliability and
service quality. Several approaches have been used to make service allocation more
equitable, attempting to better balance facility workloads. However, the relative capabilities …
Abstract
Location covering models are important spatial analytic methods, and have been widely applied to different facility siting problems in order to support decision making processes. It is common to observe facilities that have significantly different workloads when traditional coverage models are relied upon. This can and does impact system efficiency, reliability and service quality. Several approaches have been used to make service allocation more equitable, attempting to better balance facility workloads. However, the relative capabilities of such approaches to address equity remains largely unexplored, particularly in the context of location coverage analytics. This paper studies modeling approaches that can be used to explicitly balance facility workloads, focusing on maximal coverage. Approaches are evaluated comparatively, with completeness, inferiority and maximum gap measures introduced to support this. Empirical results show that if a model does not appropriately reflect workload balancing explicitly, optimality is unlikely. A cost, however, is the need to track explicit variation between sited facilities, which proves to require significantly more computational effort than approximate approaches.
Elsevier
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