Facility Location in Cities: the Optimal Location of Emergency Units Within Cities

Over the past four decades, there has been anincreasing interest in the problem of effectivefacility location in many societies. The questionarises as to how many schools, hospitals, ambulances, warehouses, fire stations, emergency centers areneeded and their respective locations to achieve aprescribed level of service. This book is concernedwith the problem of locating emergency facilitiesefficiently and effectively in cities. We developthree new heuristic methods with the objective ofincreasing accessibility to these facilities and thusreducing their response time. This book details thedevelopment, implementation, and testing of the threenew heuristics in addition to applying our bestheuristic to the location of ambulance stations inthe Perth metropolitan area in Western Australia. Furthermore, we also developed an effective methodfor locating new facilities among old facilities. This book is well suited for students, lecturers, researchers, and anyone who is interested in thelocation and operation of emergency facilities insome major cities such as New York, Austin, LosAngeles, Denver, Vancouver, Bangkok, Taipei, SantoDomingo and Belfast.