New Directions in Locational Analysis, Environmental Modelling and Humanitarian Logistics

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Part I: New Directions in Locational Analysis***Part I.1: Continuous Demand in Location and Location-Reliability Models***In most GIS/GPS applications consumer demand is represented as continuously distributed over a certain geographical region. Yet, most facility location models assume the demand originates from a discrete set of points, leading to potentially large aggregation errors. In addition to the practical importance of modeling continuously distributed demand, this research has the potential to provide insights into characteristics of optimal solutions: What do optimal facility configurations look like under different conditions? What changes can be expected when some fundamental system parameters (e.g., reliability of facilities) changes? Such insights are often impossible to provide in discrete location settings. ***Part I.2 Multi-Market Marketing-Distribution Models***A firm introducing a new product or service to the market must develop a coordinated marketing-distribution strategy, where the "marketing" part refers to the marketing support the new product will receive and "distribution" has to do with how the product will be made available to the market. These two sets of issues have, until recently been addressed by two different bodies of literature: marketing and facility location. Our objective is the development of integrated multi-market multi-channel marketing-location models, providing important managerial insights and practical decision support tools. We will also study the role of information interchange between different players in the system. ******Part II: Environmental Modelling and Technology Choice***One of the key questions in sustainable operations is how to create the proper set of incentives to motivate firms to make "green" technology choices, particularly through the use of environmental taxation and related tools. We study a model consisting of two layers: the "regulator" setting the tax policy, and several profit-maximizing firms responding to that policy by selecting production technologies, production levels and prices, acting as a followers. Our results underscore the importance of taking operational aspects into account when setting environmental policy, and open many further directions for additional research. ******Part III: Humanitarian Logistics***One crucial and under-studied aspect of HL is related to facility location, where "facilities" may include depots, warehouses and distributing centers that are used for pre-positioning, storage, or staging of relief supplies, equipment or personnel. Related issue is the determination of the required amount resources to achieve reasonable protection levels and how this resources should be optimally deployed in a given relief scenario. Our goal is to create an efficient decision-support tool enabling planners to make decisions on resources and to construct detailed operational plans.