Motivated by recent real-life applications in Location Theory in which the location decisions generate controversy, we propose a novel bilevel location model in which, on the one hand, there is a leader that chooses among a number of fixed potential locations which ones to establish. Next, on the second hand, there is one or several followers that, once the leader location facilities have been set, chooses his location points in a continuous framework. The leader's goal is to maximize some proxy to the weighted distance to the follower's location points, while the follower(s) aim is to locate his location points as close as possible to the leader ones. We develop the bilevel location model for one follower and for any polyhedral distance, and we extend it for several followers and any p-norm, p ∈ Q, p ≥ 1. We prove the NP-hardness of the problem and propose different mixed integer linear programming formulations. Moreover, we develop alternative Benders decomposition algorithms for the problem. Finally, we report some computational results comparing the formulations and the Benders decompositions on a set of instances.
In this paper we provide a mathematical programming based decision tool to optimally reallocate and share equipments between different units in emergency situations under lack of resources. The approach is motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic in which many Heath National Systems were not able to satisfy the demand of ventilators, sanitary individual protection equipments or different human resources. Our tool is based in two main principles:(1) Part of the stock of equipments at a unit that is not needed (in near future) could be shared to other units; and (2) extra stock to be shared among the units in a region can be efficiently distributed taking into account the demand of the units. The decisions are taken with the aim of minimizing certain measures of the non-covered demand in a region where a given network structured set of units is given. The mathematical programming models that we provide are stochastic and multiperiod and we provide different robust objective functions. Since the proposed models are computationally hard to solve, we provide a divide-et-conquer math-heuristic approach. We report the results of applying our approach to the data of the COVID-19 case in different regions of Spain, highlighting some interesting conclusions of our analysis, such as the great increase of treated patients if the proposed redistribution tool is applied.
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