Evolutionary algorithms applied to competitive facility location

Facility location applications are concerned with the location of one or more facilities in a way that optimizes one or several objectives simultaneously, such as minimizing transportation costs, providing equitable service to customers, capturing the largest market share, etc. This book, ¿Evolutionary algorithms applied to competitive facility location: sequential and parallel implementations for single and multi-objective models¿, provides, on the one hand, heuristic algorithms able to solve single and multi-objective competitive continuous location problems and, on the other hand, parallel techniques which reduce the execution time, allow to solve larger problems and, in some cases, improve the quality of the solutions. In this book, three real life competitive location problems have been addressed. The first one is a single facility location problem in which the demand varies depending on the location of the facility. The second one is the leader-follower problem with variable demand which can be considered as an extension of the previous model. And the last one is a bi-objective planar franchisor-franchisee facility location and design problem.