Method of Determining Future Facility Location with Maintaining Present Accessibility

Abstract

The public services closely related to the daily lives of the Japanese people, such as firefighting, police or primary school education, are largely financed by the local governments. As the population as a whole in Japan declines, the population in local regions are forecasted to experience particularly rapid decline in the future, and it is inevitable to reduce the cost of public services provided by the local governments to keep their financial basis sustainable. In order to provide public services to the people properly and fairly, the local governments own and utilize their public facilities, such as fire stations, police stations or primary schools. On the other hand, we have to secure the accessibility, which is the condition of accessing a facility easily in a whole local city including the high population density area and low population density area. In this paper, we propose a method of determining the number of future facilities and its facility locations in which we maintain the present accessibility. In our proposed method, we determine them comparing the accessibility measurement calculated by facility location model using the present and future population. We adopted k-centdian model as the facility location model, which can secure the accessibility in a whole local city determining the weights of both areas. We applied our proposed method to fire station in Iwaki city, Japan. The results suggested that 7 facilities would be reduced in 2064, after 50 years from 2014. Additionally, we confirmed that the future facility location had secured accessibility in both high and low population density area.