Fuzzy goal programming approach to location problems: An application on the location of waste containers

The Location Problems may arise out of every stage of production processes from suppliers to customers. The selection of an appropriate place for a new plant, the location of in-plant machines, or the determination of different places for service units are typical examples of location problems. In these problems, there are some multiple conflicting objectives such as demand, cost, profit expectation, and environmental concern. Therefore, compromised solutions, which satisfy all objectives, are sought for these multi-objective problems. In this study, an application about determining the location of recyclable waste containers was executed in Siteler District part of Konyaaltı Municipality in Antalya. For this problem, a location and rotation model based fuzzy goal programming was built. It was aimed to select optimal location nodes, which serve the maximum number of dwellings from candidate locations nodes and also, to create a minimum-distanced route between selected nodes. The recyclable waste containers were located on optimal nodes of the route obtained by the mathematical model, which run for different tolerance intervals and different priority structures. Keywords: Multi-objective location models, location and routing problems, fuzzy goal programming