The multi-covering emergency service facility location problem with considering disaster losses

Locating emergency service facilities is a fundamental problem in emergency management. In practice, major disasters (such as fire, earthquake, and flood) often cause enormous property losses. How to reduce the losses caused by disasters is an important issue in emergency management. In this paper, the multi-covering emergency service facility location problem is investigated. It is the first time that disaster losses are considered in the problem and are formulated into a quadratic function of the distance (time) from emergency service facilities to disaster sites (demand points). An integer linear programming model is constructed to determine the number and location of required emergency service facilities, as well as the allocation of demand points covered by each emergency service facility. The objective function of the model is to minimize the sum of disaster losses and the total costs of emergency service facilities. Numerical simulation results on a concrete fire station location problem show that the location sites found by the model with considering disaster losses are more reasonable than the traditional model without considering disaster losses. The proposed model and algorithm in this study can also be adapted for solving other facility location problems.