Facility Location–Network Design Problems

Facility location and network design are well-known problem areas in combinatorial optimization. However, problems in the combined area of facility location–network design (FLND) have been much less studied. FLND problems are the focus of this book. The overall goal in these problems is to improve client access to facilities. The means of reaching this goal include building both facilities (as in facility location) and travelable links (as in network design). We measure client access to facilities by the sum of the travel costs, and our objective is to minimize this sum. In this book we present a variety of approaches to solving this NP-hard problem, including integer programming formulations, heuristics for finding good feasible solutions, techniques for finding good lower bounds, as well as exact solvers.