Allocating servers to facilities, when demand is elastic to travel and waiting times

¹ Department of Electrical Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Vicuna Mackenna 4860, Santiago, Chile; marianov@ing.puc.cl; mrios@ing.puc.cl
² Graduate Program, Department of Systems Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Vicuna Mackenna 4860, Santiago, Chile; FBarros@sqm.cl

Received: 10 December 2004
Accepted: 19 September 2005

Abstract

Public inoculation centers are examples of facilities providing service to customers whose demand is elastic to travel and waiting time. That is, people will not travel too far, or stay in line for too long to obtain the service. The goal, when planning such services, is to maximize the demand they attract, by locating centers and staffing them so as to reduce customers' travel time and time spent in queue. In the case of inoculation centers, the goal is to maximize the people that travel to the centers and stay in line until inoculated. We propose a procedure for the allocation of multiple servers to centers, so that this goal is achieved. An integer programming model is formulated. Since demand is elastic, a supply-demand equilibrium equation must be explicitly included in the optimization model, which then becomes nonlinear. As there are no exact procedures to solve such problems, we propose a heuristic procedure, based on Heuristic Concentration, which finds a good solution to this problem. Numerical examples are presented.