Facility location, also known as location analysis, is a branch of operations research concerning itself with mathematical modeling and solution of problems concerning the placement of facilities in order to minimize transportation costs, avoid placing hazardous materials near housing, outperform competitors' facilities, etc.

A simple facility location problem is the Fermat-Weber problem, in which a single facility is to be placed, with the only optimization criterion being the minimization of the sum of distances from a given set of point sites. More complex problems considered in this discipline include the placement of multiple facilities, constraints on the locations of facilities, and more complex optimization criteria.

See also

• Graph center
• Quadratic assignment problem

External links

• INFORMS section on location analysis, a professional society concerned with facility location.
• Bibliography on facility location collected by Trevor Hale, containing over 3400 articles.
• Library of location algorithms
• Web-based facility location utility (single facility)