Description:

Facility location problem concerned with the optimal placement of facilities to minimize transportation costs while considering factors like load balancing and competitor's facilities. Instances of the problem are e.g. where should a new supermarket chain open its stores in Auckland to maximise customer flow? where should a health provider locate medical facilities? More formally, the problem can be described as follows: The input consist of a weighted graph representing a spatial network, a set of vertices on the graph representing candidate facility locations, and a population of residents on each vertex. The problem asks (1) an assignment from each resident to a facility so that the population distribution among all facilities are even; and (2)  a small number of vertices in which facilities will be opened, so that  the total distance between all residents to a facility is as small as possible. The project aims to propose new artificial intelligence methods for solving this problem on Auckland spatial information, which has been obtained from Auckland Council Open Data. 

Type:

Undergraduate

Outcome:

At the completion of this project students are expected to successfully implement and present,
- A software tool that solves the facility location problem and its variants using different optimisation or simulation methods.
- Visualisation of solutions over a GIS tools
- Critical analysis and comparisons of the methods used

Prerequisites

None

Specialisations

• Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Software Engineering

Categories

• AI & Machine learning

Supervisor

• Jiamou Liu

Co-supervisor

• Mohan Sridharan

Team

• Juno Jin
• Nathan Situ

Lab

Lab allocations have not been finalised