An Optimization Model to Rationalize Public Service Facilities

Facility Location Models (FLMs) have been widely applied in the context of both private and public sector, to decide the best configuration of new facilities to be located in a given area. In the last years, due to the general interest to reduce costs and improve efficiency, several works focused on problems aimed at modifying the territorial configuration of existing facilities, in terms of number, position and/or capacities, etc. In this work, we propose a new mathematical model to support territorial re-organization decisions in non-competitive contexts. The model assumes the presence of a set of facilities providing different types of services to users (multi-type facilities) and explores the possibility to improve the efficiency of the system by implementing different rationalization actions; i.e., facility closure, service closure, capacity reallocation among services at a given facility. The model aims at finding a trade-off solution between the service efficiency and the need of ensuring a given accessibility level to users. It has been tested on a set of randomly generated instances, to show that a good range of problems can be solved to optimality through the use of a commercial solver (CPLEX).