Facilities, locations, customers: Building blocks of location models. A survey

As evidenced by the remarkable diversity of real world applications which have been modeled and solved as location problems, the eld studying the optimal location of facilities is a very interdisciplinary and broad research area. The purpose of this paper is to t the large variety of location models within a general unied framework, which arises from the description of the three buildings blocks of location problems, namely: facilities, customers, and locations. We provide evidences of how a particular problem specication can be stated mathematically as an optimization problem by opportunely combining into a compact and workable model the main features that characterize and relate these three elements.