Location-allocation by demand weigh

[JavierSánchez]

Hi everybody

I am facing a location-allocation problem and I do not know how to solve it. I am not sure if the options that ArcGIS 10-Network Analyst provides in the location-allocation tool are useful for my objective.

I need to locate a certain number of facilities but the requirement, apart from being located where de distances from demand points to facilities are minimized, is that they need to be supplied by a determined quantity of demand, in other words, they all must have the same weight allocated.

I have tried with the six options the location-allocation tool includes and none of them solves this problem. The facilities that they located are always of different size (weight allocated). The only ???solution??? I found is to make iterated calculations with the option ???Maximize coverage??? adding one by one the number of facilities to choose.

Has anybody tried to solve a problem like this? Any ideas?

Thank you very much in advance.

[JaySandhu · Accepted solution]

What you are trying to solve involves capacity constraints for each facility. This option was added in version 10.1
See the "Maximize Capacitated Coverage" here:
http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//004700000050000000

Jay Sandhu

[JavierSánchez]

What you are trying to solve involves capacity constraints for each facility. This option was added in version 10.1
See the "Maximize Capacitated Coverage" here:
http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//004700000050000000

Jay Sandhu

Thank you Jay, it seems that this is what I was looking for. I just have to get ArcGIS 10.1!!

[ShannonThol1]

Jay,

I am also working on a limited capacity location-allocation problem.  However, my demand points do not all have equal supply potential.  In other words, I want to specify capacities of candidate facilities but base these numbers on supply values for the individual demand points (rather than a total number of demand points).  Can I do this with the Demand Point Weight field?

Thank you,
Shannon

[JaySandhu]

Yes!
The capacity at each facility is matched against the amount of demand (demand weight) at each demand location. So you can have demand locations with different amounts of demand and that will be matched against the capacity of the chosen facility.

Jay Sandhu