Locating a semi-obnoxious facility on a network with the elliptic maximin and network minisum objectives

Permanent URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20194592
Title:
Locating a semi-obnoxious facility on a network with the elliptic maximin and network minisum objectives
Creator:
Heydari, Ruhollah (Author)
Contributor:
Melachrinoudis, Emanuel (Advisor)
Kubat, Peter (Committee member)
Language:
English
Publisher:
Boston, Massachusetts : Northeastern University, 2015
Date Accepted:
August 2015
Date Awarded:
August 2015
Type of resource:
Text
Genre:
Masters theses
Format:
electronic
Digital origin:
born digital
Abstract/Description:
Stricter environmental standards and increasing public awareness compels production engineers and urban designers to pay more attention to sustainability and human health issues when placing new materials or facilities into the environment, especially when they have adverse effects on people. Some examples of these semi-obnoxious facilities are power plants, chemical plants, waste dumps or airports. From the pollution point of view, these facilities should be located as far as possible from population centers to minimize the risk of hazards but this will increase the transportation cost, which is not acceptable. This contrasting nature led many researchers to study this problem as a push-pull bi-objective model.

This Thesis considers the problem of locating a semi-obnoxious facility on a general network, so as to minimize the total transportation cost between the new facility and the demand points (minisum), and at the same time to minimize the undesirable effects of the new facility by maximizing its distance from the closest population center (maximin). The two objectives employ different distance metrics to reflect reality. Since vehicles move on the transportation network, the shortest path distance is suitable for the minisum objective. For the maximin objective, however, the elliptic distance metric is used to reflect the impact of wind in the distribution of pollution. An efficient algorithm is developed to find the nondominated set of the bi-objective model and is implemented on a numerical example. Simulation results confirmed that the proposed algorithm has an average polynomial time complexity.
Subjects and keywords:
bi-objective optimization
facility location
semi-obnoxious facility
transportation network
Land use -- Planning -- Mathematical models
Industrial location -- Planning -- Mathematical models
Urban transportation -- Planning -- Mathematical models
Pollution -- Economic aspects
NIMBY syndrome
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17760/D20194592
Permanent Link:
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20194592
Use and reproduction:
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