This paper surveys the history of location models. Starting with the earliest contributions in mathematics, it follows the journey of the topic through its reincarnations in geography and finally in operations research. While we attempted to highlight the major milestones, we do not claim this survey to be comprehensive. Being the 50th anniversary of EURO, we highlighted the contribution of some of the most active European groups.

This paper surveys the history of location models. Starting with the earliest contributions in mathematics, it follows the journey of the topic through its reincarnations in geography and finally in operations research. While we attempted to highlight the major milestones, we do not claim this survey to be comprehensive. Being the 50th anniversary of EURO, we highlighted the contribution of some of the most active European groups.

The objective of facility location models is to maximize the profit or minimize the cost of a company that wishes to expand or enter the market. The market share captured by facilities is a function of the distances to the facilities and their attractiveness. The analysis involves how to estimate the market share captured by facilities, where to locate new facilities, how to determine their attractiveness, and reactions of competitors to the actions of locating a facility. This invited review is dedicated to honor Tammy Drezner and her significant contributions to the field of competitive location. Her main innovative contributions include ways to find best locations for competing facilities, methods to assess their attractiveness levels, and significant modifications to the classic gravity model. The research on competitive facility location is still evolving and there are many aspects yet to be analyzed. A list of ideas for future research is proposed.

This paper models duopolistic competition between an online retailer and a physical store retailer with the online retailer modelled as a firm with uniform delivered pricing policy and the physical store as a firm with a mill pricing policy. Both firms seek to maximize their respective profits through an appropriate choice of location and price. The market is assumed to be given by a “uniform path” - a tree whose node weights and arc lengths are equal. Modelling reality, we consider two alternate types of transportation costs faced by the online retailer: either dependent on the relative location of the firm and a customer or independent of it. Beginning with the framework of a Stackelberg, i.e., sequential game, optimal location and price strategies are analytically derived for both sequences of market entry by the two competitors. Cases in which the leader faces the first entry paradox or can become a monopolist by strategically deterring entry by the follower are delineated. Thereafter, Nash Equilibrium solutions to the simultaneous game are identified. Salient insights from the results include: (a) the competitive pressure faced by the physical store in the presence of online competition (b) the inability of an online retailer to compete in “large” markets under the first type of transportation cost and (c) the advantage to the physical retailer of being a market leader.

Hazardous materials such as fuel, solvents, organic waste from hospitals, used batteries, explosives, and nuclear waste need to be transported to and from the facilities that use, produce, and dispose of them. Managing these transports requires a design that alleviates negative effects of these activities, such as the loss of lives, environmental damage, and the destruction of property. Despite the large body of literature addressing numerous aspects regarding hazardous materials, there is no clear consensus on how potential adverse effects should be measured when optimizing facility location and route design. Our analysis commences with a look at the primary stakeholders in these activities: the population that is potentially affected by transportation, the firms that pay for it, and the government regulator, whose task is to protect the population at large. This chapter proposes two new indicators related to these activities, which are easy to compute, avoid the use of unreliable very low probability estimations, take care of the regulatory agencies and public concern, and, in our view, are more understandable to the public. Mathematical programming problems that integrate criteria for all stakeholders are formulated and solved. The methodology is then applied to a real case in order to determine an optimal transport route for the transport of hazardous materials in and out of the city of Santiago, Chile.

This paper addresses retail store location in a duopoly. One firm, the so-called leader, has already lo-cated several stores, while a second firm, the follower that offers a different product, considers locating its stores in the same area. Both products have some degree of complementarity. Marianov et al. (2018) studied this problem considering a customer decision rule that is binary (winner-take-all) and deter-ministic (there are no uncertainties related to customers' behavior). In that work, they concluded that multipurpose shopping has a strong influence on optimal store location. This paper extends that work by introducing random utility customer choice rules based on the Multinomial Logit model. Along these lines, we propose the new Partially Binary Logit rule, applicable to the case in which all stores of a firm have identical attributes, except for their location. In this case, a customer always chooses the least cost trip store of the firm to purchase its product. We propose one nonlinear and three linear formulations for the follower location problem, and a Branch and Cut method for one of them. Two of the formulations have a good performance for instances of up to at least 200 nodes. We compare the binary, Multinomial Logit, and Partially Binary Logit rules by analyzing the captured markets and location patterns for a large set of randomly generated 100-node instances.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Location problems occur all around us: finding a new location of a warehouse, a location for a fast-food outlet, a newspaper transfer point, an ambulance, or any other of a myriad of facilities that are to be sited. All location problems, regardless how different they may sound like or actually be, have four components in common: space, distance, customers, and facilities. As far as space goes, we either work in an n-dimensional space or on a network. In case of an n-dimensional space, most often we work in two dimensions, e.g., on a surface such as a map. However, locations in three-dimensional space may also be considered, e.g., when locating satellites for the transmission of information, or satellites whose task is to destroy incoming objects that are considered threatening to a country.

AbstractCity parks have been around almost as long as civilization. Early examples are the Persian gardens, e.g., the Eram gardens in Shiraz, Iran (Unesco, The Persian garden, 2021) that date back to the sixth century BC, the green spaces in the cities of Tikal at about 1000 BC (the Mayan civilization in present-day Guatemala, see, e.g., Lentz et al., Sci Rep 11, 12725, 2021 or Miller, Did the ancient Maya have parks?, 2021), the Gardens of Maecenas (Imperium Romanum, Wonderful gardens of Maecenas, 2020) on the Esquiline Hills (one of the seven hills Rome was founded upon), which, interestingly enough, were for a time used as graveyards and hanging grounds; they were first covered by a thick layer of soil, and then Maecenas transformed the area into a beautiful garden, which later became public property. Many other parks existed in Rome, some private and, as many places in ancient Rome, public.

The application presented in this chapter deals with private schools. The history of schools has been well documented, for an in-depth description, see Urban et al. (American Education: A History, 6th edn., Routledge, New York, 2019), while for a brief account, we refer readers to Kennedy (A timeline of private school events and history. Private School Review, 2022). Some details may exemplify the situation. In ancient Egypt, wealthy boys would start school at age 7 (see Ancient Pages, What were ancient Egyptian schools like?, 2016), in India, a young boy would leave his home and live with his teacher, where he would receive instruction and required to do some manual labor in return (see Jain, What did the ancient Indian education system look like? Culture Trip, 2018), and in ancient Greece, education would differ greatly between the competing city states Sparta and Athens: In Sparta, young boys at the age of 6 would start school, which concentrated on military matters, while in Athens, at the age of 7, boys of wealthy parents went to school, where private tutors instructed them in the arts, mostly by reading Homer and playing a musical instrument; see, e.g., Ancient Greece Facts (Ancient Greece schools, undated).

Firefighting has a long and illustrious history. The first to deal with firefighting equipment appears to have been Ctesibius of Alexandria (about 270 BC), who invented, among other things, a force pump (see Britannica (Encyclopedia Britannica, undated)), which could be used for fighting fires. His invention was pretty much forgotten afterwards, though. The ancient Roman empire also had its fire brigades that comprised thousands of slaves, who were responsible not only to fight fires, but also to enforce fire codes of the day. Nothing much is known about fighting fires in the Middle Ages. In the seventeenth Century in the New Word, Boston was the first to have firefighting co-ops, which comprised property owners, who vowed to help each other out in case of a fire. The first fire chief was Benjamin Franklin in about 1736 in Philadelphia, whose idea was to protect not just houses of the members of some co-op, but all houses (presumably since a fire in any of the wooden houses would spread quickly and thus endanger all of them). In 1699 François du Mouriez introduced some more modern equipment and provided a number of pumps in Paris. A century later, Napoleon Bonaparte established a segment of the army, the sapeur-pompiers, that was equipped with manual fire pumps. In 1824, the Scottish city of Edinburgh established its own fire department, to be followed by London 8 years later. Another important day occurred in 1853, when the city of Cincinnati created one of the first salaried fire department (CFD History, The Diary, undated). They were also frontrunners when it came to using a steam engine in their department. For an excellent account of the history of firefighting, see Fireserviceinfo (A Little Fire Service History, 2011). Figure 7.1 shows a manual pumper fire wagon from the 1860s.

Since the 1920s, airports have become an integral part of the landscape. Life today is hard to imagine without airports; not just for passengers, but also—and increasingly important—freight. Following Our World in Data ( https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-airline-passengers?tab=table , undated), there were no less than 4.32 billion passengers in 2018. Furthermore, given the increasing trend to purchase items online, Statista (Worldwide air freight traffic from 2004 to 2022, 2022a) asserts that there have been 63 million metric tons of freight shipped via airplane, tendency increasing. Given the tremendous costs of locating, relocating, or expanding an airport, this is only done in extenuating circumstances. One such case is the relocating of Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport to the formerly quaint island of Lantau at Chep Lap Kok. The new airports in Hong Kong and the one in Kansei near Osaka, Japan, cost US$20 billion each. In comparison, the new airport in London Heathrow) cost US$10.5 billion, while the airport in Denver, Colorado cost US$4.8 billion (Dingman, 10 most expensive airports ever built in the world. The Richest, 2013). An example for an exceedingly costly mistake is Montreal’s Mirabel airport. Conceived in the early 1970s for the 1976 Olympic Games, no less than 98,000 acres (153 square miles!) were originally expropriated for the purpose, generating fierce opposition. Only 17,000 acres, i.e., less than 20% of this area was actually in the operations zone. The decision to use Mirabel only for international flights, requiring passengers to make a 1-h drive to Dorval airport for connections, proved fatal. The last commercial flight into Mirabel was in 2004. The terminal building was demolished 10 years later, and part of the area is now used for commercial and aviation activities. 81,000 acres have been deeded back to their original owners. Part of the history along with some other historical accounts can be found in the Airport History.org (undated) website.

This textbook for students and practitioners applies Multicriteria Decision Making (MCDM) tools and techniques to solving problems in location analysis.

Municipal solid waste (a.k.a. garbage) is a major concern in developed and developing countries alike. Garbage generation has been increasing for a long time and has now (2018 data) reached 5.69 lbs. per capita per day (United States), 4.23 lbs. (France), 2.87 lbs. (Saudi Arabia), 2.25 lbs. (China) as per Statista (Daily Municipal Solid Waste Generation Per Capita Worldwide in 2018, by Select Country, 2020a). In Chile, the OECD (Data: Municipal Waste, 2017) reports a daily per-capita generation of 2.66 lbs. In most countries, a large proportion of the garbage is landfilled. The number of landfills per capita differs greatly between countries. For instance, in 2002, there were 1775 landfills in Germany (via How many landfills are there, 2014), which, in conjunction with its population of 83,784,000 (as per Worldometer, Countries in the World by Population, 2020) results in 47,200 people per landfill, while Italy’s 642 landfill serve 60,460,000 people, i.e., 91,175 people per landfill, all the way to China’s 654 landfills (A rubbish story, 2019), which translates to 2.2 million people per landfill. However, rather than measuring the number of people per landfill, a (probably) more meaningful number of would be the landfill area required per capita, certainly in densely populated countries, in which space is at a premium. Pertinent references are BBC News (A Rubbish Story, 2019) and Rubbish Prohibited (How many landfills are there?, 2014).

AbstractOut-of-home (OOH) advertising has been around for a very long time. Following BMedia (History of billboard advertising, 2019), Jared Bell was the first to create outdoor advertising, mostly in the form of murals. More about the general history of outdoor advertising can be found in Capitol (History of billboard advertising, 2022). An out-of-home advertising sign of a grocery store is shown in Fig. 14.1.