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 field studying the optimal location of facilities is a very interdisciplinary and broad research area. The purpose of this paper is to fit the large variety of location models within a general unified 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 specification 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.