Location-Allocation Models

Location-allocation models decide where to place a set of facilities and simultaneously assign demand points to them so as to optimize an objective such as total travel cost, worst-case distance, or population covered. Rooted in the operations-research work of Cooper (1963) and Hakimi (1964) and central to network GIS, they answer questions like where to site warehouses, hospitals, fire stations, or schools to best serve a spatially distributed population.