Locating an obnoxious facility within a polygonal region

The purpose of this paper is to review some of the many instances in which a location analyst must make a decision as to where an obnoxious facility should be placed. An obnoxious facility is one that can be defined as a facility which has undesirable interactions with existing facilities. Examples include equipment which emit pollutants such as particulates, noise and radiation or warehouses that contain flammable materials. Other obnoxious facilities include machines that are potential sources of hazards to nearby machines and workers. The interaction between the obnoxious facility and each existing facility is reflected through a weighting factor. The feasible region is considered to be continuous in the form of a convex or nonconvex simple polygon. Since the new facility is to be located away from the existing facilities, an appropriate criterion for optimization is the MAXIMIN or the MAXISUM criterion. Algorithms are reviewed for two common metrics under both criteria, i.e. Euclidean and rectilinear.