Location determination of hierarchical service facilities using a multi-layered greedy heuristic approach

Many urban areas in developing countries are experiencing dramatic growth in both population and economy, which highlights the need for optimizing service affordance by the government. Driven by this demand, this article proposes a new concept, namely the hierarchical service facility (HSF), for managing services with multiple levels of service range. The challenge is to strategically position HSFs to cover all residents of a subdistrict at every service range level with a minimum cost. To this end, this location determination issue was formulated into a hierarchical discrete unit disk cover (H-DUDC) problem. An algorithmic solution using a multi-layered greedy heuristic was developed to solve the H-DUDC problem, and its effectiveness was validated through a practical case study. The experimental results indicate that the HSF concept is an effective tool for optimizing service resource distribution and balancing the use of public services in different sub-zones of a residential area.