Serving regional demand in facility location

Location modelling is employed in urban and regional planning to site facilities that provide services of some sort. Issues to be considered usually include the number of facilities to locate, where to site those facilities and how demand is to be served. Given the geographic nature of location problems, a key issue is how to represent facilities and demand in geographic space. Traditionally, spatial abstraction as discrete demand is assumed as it simplifies model formulation and reduces computational complexity. However, errors in derived solutions are likely not negligible, especially when demand varies continuously across a region. This paper discusses a single facility location problem that considers demand to be continuously distributed and allows a facility to be located anywhere in space, the continuous Weber problem. An approach for dealing with continuous demand is proposed that is integrated through geographical information system (GIS) functionality. Empirical results highlight the advantages of the developed approach and the importance of solution integration with GIS.