Improving Accessibility and Efficiency of Service Facility through Location-Based Approach: A Case Study at Narvik University College

Location problem of service facility has never lost its appeal to both academics and practitioners due to the complexity in balancing availability, responsiveness and efficiency. In this paper, a location-based study is performed in order to improve the accessibility of service facility in terms of availability and responsiveness for customers as well as the efficiency for service providers. This study employs two well-known location models for service facility: Maximal covering location model which aims to maximize the coverage of customer demands with limited number of facilities (efficiency) and p-median location model which aims to minimize the overall distance travelled from customs to service facilities (accessibility), and location-based comparison of the two solutions in a case study at the 3rd floor of the main building of Narvik University College (NUC) for improving the overall performance of printing service is conducted so as to illustrates a deep insight of real-world application. The optimal solutions for maximizing the overall performance are obtained under different scenarios, and Lingo software is applied for resolving the computational optimization problems.

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