Maria Eugénia Captivo (Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)

Short Biography

Maria Eugénia Captivo obtained her Ph.D. in Operations Research at the University of Lisbon in 1988. She is Associate Professor of Operations Research at the Faculty of Science, University of Lisbon , and a researcher at the Operations Research Center (member of the executive committee from 1994 to July 2003). She has authored or co-authored about 40 scientific articles in journals, books and proceedings, and 17 extended abstracts (all with referees) in combinatorial optimization, mostly in the areas of location, network optimization and paper production planning and cutting. She has supervised 8 PhD and 13 MSc students. She has lectured several courses either for undergraduate or for master students in Operations Research, Integer and Combinatorial Optimization, Location Problems, Mathematical Programming, Graph Theory and Network Optimization. She participated in several research and development projects between university and industry in the areas of production planning, vehicle and crew scheduling, vehicle routing and distribution. She was the leader of some research and development projects regarding the development of a decision support system for production planning and cutting of paper rolls.

Lecture to be presented in EWI 2007

Title

Semiobnoxious Location Problems: Some Approaches

Abstract

Most location models deal with desirable facilities, such as warehouses, service and transportation centers, emergency services, etc., which interacts with the customers and where usually travel is involved. As a consequence, typical criteria for such decisions include minimizing some function of the distances between facilities and/or clients (i.e., average travel time, average response time, cost function of travel or response time, maximum travel time/cost, etc.).
During the last two decades, those responsible for the overall development of the area, where the new equipment is going to be located (i.e., central government, local authorities) as well as those living there, are showing an increasing interest in preserving the area's quality of life. Hence, new words have been introduced in the location theory, such as: noxious, obnoxious, semiobnoxious, hazardous, etc. Undesirable or semiobnoxious facilities provide useful service but its proximity is disagreeable or even harmful. As examples, we can mention:
  - nuclear and military installations;
  - equipment emitting particulate or noise, warehouses containing flammable materials, regions containing refuse or waste materials;
  - garbage dumps, sewage plants, correctional centers, mega-airports, etc.
The traditional optimality criterion of closeness (to locate the facility as close as possible to the customers) is replaced by the opposite criterion (how far away from the customers can the facility be placed ensuring accessibility to the demand points). This generates the NIMBY syndrome (Not - In - My - Back - Yard).
The environmental issues on the approaches to undesirable facility location have generally been formulated as constraints or addressed by a surrogate criterion (distance) on a single objective structure. Nevertheless they deal with a number of conflicting objectives. Single objective models cannot be expected to accurately represent problems of this type.
Quite surprisingly multiobjective decision making tools have barely been used in the undesirable facility location literature. Only a small percentage of the publications in this area deal with multicriteria models or tools. The different criteria are formulated as constraints imposing some minimum or maximum value, or are addressed by a surrogate criterion (like distance) on a single objective structure. In some papers we can find multiobjective location models, but the procedures used to solve them seem to be inadequate.
We discuss multicriteria location approaches for semiobnoxious facility location taking into account several issues. In particular, we will present bicriteria integer or mixed integer linear models for facility location with environmental aspects and a decision support system based on an interactive procedure used to solve the model.

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