Facility Locations In Montana

Abstract

Location models have developed into an extensive area of research because the effectiveness of facilities is dependent on their locations. An emergency health facility located in a region that is accessible to as many people as possible is ideal. We chose Montana as the region in which to find the optimal locations for facilities because Montana is a large state with a dispersed population. By using the county seats as our potential locations, we created two distance measures: Euclidean and road mileage. We found the optimal location for one, two and three facilities in Montana by using distance measures alone and also weighted by population. The optimal locations varied slightly with the two distance measures but the weighted distance measures gave the same results, thereby the demand outweighs the distance measure. With each additional facility placed in Montana, the average distance traveled decreased thus increasing the effectiveness of the facilities. We finished by comparing our algorithms with current models used in operations research.