Location of an Obnoxious Facility with Rectilinear Distance: A Genetic Algorithm Approach

Abstract

Undesirable or obnoxious facility location problems are the most active research areas with location theory in recent years. In this paper, we consider the problem of locating a single obnoxious facility in the continuous plane, where the location of the facility is restricted to be outside a specified forbidden region around each demand point. The objective of this problem is to minimize the sum of the weighted rectilinear distances from the demand points to the facility. We propose an efficient approach for finding the near-optimal facility location based on a well-known optimization procedure, genetic algorithms. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.