X - International Journal of Information Science and Computer Mathematics (Closed Ed TRF)
Volume 1, Issue 1, Pages 9 - 29
(February 2010)
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A LOCATION-ALLOCATION MODEL FOR SITING HIGH EDUCATIONAL FACILITIES
M. F. Seddik, S. A. Mazen and M. Nour El Deen
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Abstract:
In location-allocation problems a certain number of new facilities or supply centers are needed to be located in an area of interest in order to satisfy a pre-defined customer demands with known locations and it is not fixed or known a priori the allocation of demands to supply centers. This problem has attracted much research in the optimization literature over the last few decades since 1960s. Restricted exact algorithms as well as a lot of heuristics for searching a near optimal solution have been proposed. Among these heuristics is to consider the LA problem as identical to certain cluster analysis. In this paper, we will apply self organizing feature maps which are artificial neural networks capable of extracting the spatial structure of its input space, for finding a near optimal solution for a real life LA problem for locating a certain number of new high education facilities to serve the set of demand centers all over Egypt. In approximately all LA problems found in the literature; customer demands are pre-defined prior to the problem solution, but here in our problem there is no direct information available about customer demands, but instead some demographic data were available about each demand center from which we could calculate each center’s demand. We applied the multiple attribute value theory which is a well-known multi-criteria decision making model to calculate the demand value associated with each demand center. |
| Keywords and phrases: location-allocation, GIS, self organizing feature maps, multi-criteria decision making. |
| Communicated by Kewen Zhao |
| Number of Downloads: 47 | Number of Views: 341 |
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