UC Santa Barbara

Coverage problems have been important location models and have been widely applied in practice. A major limitation of simple coverage problems is that they do not control allocation, which might lead to unreasonable facility workloads and workload imbalance. Previous studies have been dealt with facility workload related issues in coverage problems, with one of the most popular approach is to impose capacities and/or thresholds. However, capacities and thresholds cannot guarantee facility workload balance and have associated issues in application. This dissertation seeks to evaluate existing approaches that consider workload balance in coverage problems and study alternative approaches to better address facility workload balance. The primary contribution of this research includes: better understanding and systematic evaluation of existing capacitated coverage approaches including their solution characteristics and commercial GIS performance, new modeling approaches explicitly considering facility workload balance in coverage problems that might be applied to other types of location problems, and efficient solution techniques for proposed multi-objective spatial optimization models.