Public Facility Location: Issues and Approaches

The papers collected in this issue were presented at the Task Force Meeting on Public Facility Location, held at IIASA in June 1980. The meeting was an important occasion for scientists with different backgrounds and nationalities to compare and discuss differences and similarities among their approaches to location problems. Unification and reconciliation of existing theories and methods was one of the leading themes of the meeting, and the papers collected here are part of the raw material to be used as a starting point towards this aim. The papers themselves provide a wide spectrum of approaches to both technical and substantive problems, for example, the way space is treated (continuously in Beckmann, in Mayhew, and in Thisse et al, discretely in all the others), the way customers are assigned to facilities (by behavioral models in Ermoliev and Leonardi, in Sheppard, and in Wilson, by normative rules in many others), the way the objective function is defined (ranging from total cost, to total profit, total expected utility for customers, accessibility, minimax distance, maximum covering, to a multi-objective treatment of all of them as in Revelle et al. There is indeed room for discussion, in order to find both similarities and weaknesses in different approaches. A general weakness of the current state of the art of location modeling may also be recognized: its general lack of realism relative to the political and institutional issues implied by locational decisions. This criticism, developed by Lea, might be used both as a concluding remark and as a proposal for new challenging research themes to scholars working in the field of location theory