Logistic model for the facility location problem on ellipsoids

Abstract

The facility location problem (FLP) consists of finding the best location for a facility (service center) to efficiently meet the demands of client points. Studies on the FLP have considered flat or spherical surfaces for computation of distances between these entities. However, the Earth’s surface is not flat or perfectly spherical. This article considers the ellipsoid as a more appropriate model of the Earth’s surface and adapts the FLP to address this assumption. The optimization of the adapted FLP was performed using Solver. Results on geographic instances provided important insights about the logistic financial aspect of the ellipsoid assumption.