Location-allocation analysis with facility capacity constraints

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06-13-2011 08:05 PM
JacobDaube
New Contributor
Hi,

I am looking to optimally locate numerous new facilities to accommodate a rise in demand. The demand points are census unit centroids and i am looking to maximize coverage with a fixed level of new facilities. I was wondering if there is a way to designate a maximum level of capacity that candidate facilities can service so that when a maximum capacity is reached (i.e. servicing 100 households) the extra demand points are allocated to another facility?

Thanks,
Jacob
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5 Replies
JaySandhu
Esri Regular Contributor
Jacob,

Currently the location-allocation does not support capacity constraints on the facilities.

May I ask what kind of facilities are you solving this for? Is there both a distance contraint (coverage) as well as capacity constraint? If all the faciltiies are fixed/required or already known in advance then there is another way to solve the demand allocation to facilities with capacity constraing that I can point you to.

Regards,
Jay Sandhu
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JacobDaube
New Contributor
Hi Jay,

Thanks for your quick reply. The facilities are health centers and there is likely to be a distance constraint. Alternatively there could be a high impedance parameter to even out inequity in distribution. A portion of the facilities are fixed, but not all. Thanks for your help

Cheers,
Jacob
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JukkaHöhn
New Contributor
Hi,
I have a kind of same problem. I would like to locate a known amount of facilities with limited capacity in that way that the distances from the origins to the facilities are minimized unless the capacity is reached. Jay mentioned that there might be a way to solve this problem if the facilities are already known in advance. May you give me a hint Jay, how to solve this problem?

Thanks
Jukka
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ElisabethBergstrøm
New Contributor
Sorry, just a test.
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JaySandhu
Esri Regular Contributor
If all the facilities are existing/fixed and you want to allocate demand while honoring capacity then you can use a linear programming approach. You can use the Network Analyst to compute the distances (OD Cost Matrix) and export to an external linear programming package, solve and bring back the results. All of this is shown in the following resource:
http://resources.arcgis.com/gallery/file/geoprocessing/details?entryID=C4E79AE3-1422-2418-88B2-008CC...

Jay Sandhu
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