Location determination of hierarchical service facilities using a multi-layered greedy heuristic approach

Abstract

Many urban areas in developing countries are experiencing dramatic growth in both population and economy, which highlights the need for optimizing service affordance by the government. Driven by this demand, this article proposes a new concept, namely the hierarchical service facility (HSF), for managing services with multiple levels of service range. The challenge is to strategically position HSFs to cover all residents of a subdistrict at every service range level with a minimum cost. To this end, this location determination issue was formulated into a hierarchical discrete unit disk cover (H-DUDC) problem. An algorithmic solution using a multi-layered greedy heuristic was developed to solve the H-DUDC problem, and its effectiveness was validated through a practical case study. The experimental results indicate that the HSF concept is an effective tool for optimizing service resource distribution and balancing the use of public services in different sub-zones of a residential area.

KEYWORDS:

• Hierarchical service facility
• multi-layered greedy algorithm
• location determination
• hierarchical location problem
• hierarchical discrete unit disk cover problem

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, H. Jiang, upon reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant no. 51908279, 52105323]; the Natural Science Foundation of the Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions of China [grant no. 21KJB560013]; and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province [grant no. BK20210232].