View article

We consider an uncapacitated location problem where p facilities have to be located in order to serve a given set of customers, and we assume that a customer requesting for a service has to reach a facility at his/her own cost. In this setting, a central issue is that of fairness among customers for the accessibility to the services provided. Every choice regarding the location of facilities corresponds to a distance distribution of customers to reach an open facility. Minimizing the average of this distribution would lead to a p-median problem, where system efficiency is optimized but the fair treatment of users is neglected. Minimizing the maximum (worst-case) of the distribution would lead to a p-center problem, where the unfair treatment of users is mitigated but system efficiency is neglected. To compromise between these two extremes, we minimize the conditional β-mean, ie, the average distance traveled by the 100× β …