Description: From the fast food franchise down the street to a regional landfill a hundred miles away, from a community hospital around the corner to automobile assembly plants across the country, better facility locations can assist individuals and organizations in achieving their goals and realizing their objectives. Facility location models allow analysts and decision makers to explore trade-offs between different objectives, to analyze the impacts of constraints on facility siting decisions, and to consider alternative options. offers a practice-oriented introduction to the art and science of mathematical facility location modeling. By focusing on model development, solution algorithms, and practical applications, the text gives readers an intuitive knowledge of the capabilities and limitations of different modeling techniques. The book features software that solves many of the traditional facility location models using a variety of algorithms, thereby allowing readers to gain hands-on experience in the use of different models and algorithms using realistically sized data sets. End-of-chapter exercises review fundamental concepts and algorithms, enhance model-building skills, and link theory to practice through the use of the software. Beginning with fundamentals, the text outlines a number of different facility location contexts. It then develops a taxonomy of facility location models allowing the reader to focus quickly on the key areas covered by the book. It reviews special linear programming problems that arise frequently in location modeling including: the transportation problem, which is frequently used to allocate demands to facilities once locations are known, and the shortest path problem, used to estimate distances between demand areas and candidate facility sites. The book discusses four classical location problems extensively: covering models, center problems, median models, and fixed charge location problems. For each, the text outlines key model properties and outlines important applications of the models. In discussing solution algorithms for the models, the book presents a variety of heuristic and optimization-based procedures, including greedy algorithms, local improvement algorithms, branch and bound, Lagrangian relaxation, and dual ascent algorithms. Numerical examples for each algorithm allow the reader to follow the procedures step-by-step and to consider how the approaches might be adapted to more complex model formulations. Building on these basic models, the book then considers additional, real-life applications that naturally extend from them. It analyzes interactions between facilities as well as production and distribution models. The book presents several joint location-routing models. It formulates a number of different models of hub and spoke systems such as those commonly used by airlines, as well as models for the location of undesirable facilities including landfills, hazardous waste repositories, and nuclear power plants. The text also discusses multiobjective modeling techniques that allow planners to explore trade-offs between different objectives and siting plans. This comprehensive introduction to discrete location modeling, coupled with the bundled software, allows professional planners to exploit the full range of mathematical facility location modeling techniques. Also an ideal introductory text for students interested in mastering the theoretical and practical aspects of facility location planning, is a must for practitioners and students alike. is Chairman-elect of the Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences Department at Northwestern University. He also teaches in the Civil Engineering Department and holds a joint appointment in the university''s Transportation Center. Daskin has published over 25 papers in refereed journals and has given over 50 presentations at professional society meetings. His primary areas of interest are logistics, location modeling and theory, transportation planning, and recently, manufacturing and production planning. The recipient of numerous honors, he received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in 1984, won a Burlington Northern Faculty Achievement Award for teaching excellence in 1985, and was granted a Fulbright Research Award in 1989. He was the editor-in-chief of Transportation Science and is on its Editorial Board of Advisors. In addition, he serves on the editorial boards of Location Science and The International Journal of Logistics Management and has also served on the editorial board of Transportation Research. Dr. Daskin received his PhD in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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