A service facility location problem considering customer preference and facility capacity

Most facility location models do not take customer preferences into account, and are therefore inadequate for application in service facilities. We construct a model to capture customer preferences and maximize the number of customers served. Given a set of open facilities, customers will choose facilities based on their individual preferences. As the problem is NP-hard, we design a heuristic algorithm based on maximum flow. A numerical study demonstrates the algorithm’s average performance and general applicability.