A Survey on Obnoxious Facility Location Problems

Obnoxious location models are models in which customers no longer consider the facility desirable and try to have it as close as possible to their own location, but instead avoid the facility and stay away from it. Typical applications are optimal locations of nuclear reactors, garbage dumps, or water purification plants. This work presents a survey of mathematical models for undesirable location problems in the plane and particularly on networks; solution procedures are briefly described. A brief review of extensive (obnoxious) facility location problems in networks is also given. Finally critical aspects of existing models are identified and some directions for future search are suggested.