Optimal facility location
optimization problem
Optimal facility location (OFL), also called location analysis, is a class of optimization problems. In all these problems, the goal is to decide where to locate some facility (e.g. a school, a gas station, a factory, etc.), in a way that optimizes some pre-specified criteria. Some examples are:
"Decide where to locate a new school, given the locations of the students, such that the sum of daily transportation costs of all students to the school will be as small as possible."
"Decide where to locate a new factory, given the locations of citizens, such that the minimum distance between the factory and a citizen house is as large as possible".
OFL is studied in operations research, computational geometry (a branch of computer science), and location theory (a branch of economics). Some techniques used for OFL also apply to cluster analysis.
There are various kinds of OFL problems. They differ in their objective function (e.g. sum of distances or minimum distance), in the optimization direction (maximization vs. minimization), in the number of facilities (one vs.
“Optimal facility location” enters the record as optimization problem. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Optimal, facility and location can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1305598. The Library of Congress control number is sh2002004443. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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