Analytical and operational aspects of central public facilities location

Central public services (e.g., those with high user accessibility requirements) have steadily increased in importance relative to privately provided services. One important aspect in the efficient provision of these services it their location. Unfortunately, there has been little specific research reported on public location. Most of the previous effort in this area has centered on developing operation programming models that assume minimizing facility and user travel costs to be the only location objective. The overall objective of this study is to evaluate and adapt traditional private facility location theory for central public facility location. Specific findings are that: (1) the location theory of Alfred Weber, as a basis for certain operational techniques (e.g., spatial combinatorial programming), may be successfully to only small scale problems concerning emergency facility location; such models are shown to be both analytically deficient and computationally intractable; and (2) Lo?êschian market area theory as a basis for developing an analytical model of a central public service area is a more promising approach to the problem. ..