Quadratic Optimization Models for Balancing Preferential Access and Fairness: Formulations and Optimality Conditions

Abstract

Typically, within facility location problems, fairness is defined in terms of accessibility of users. However, for facilities perceived as undesirable by communities hosting them, fairness between the usage of facilities becomes especially important. Limited research exists on this notion of fairness. To close this gap, we develop a series of optimization models for the allocation of populations of users to facilities such that access for users is balanced with a fair utilization of facilities. The optimality conditions of the underlying nonconvex quadratic models state the precise balance between accessibility and fairness. We define new classes of fairness and a metric to quantify the extent to which fairness is achieved in both optimal and suboptimal allocations. We show that a continuous relaxation of our central model is sufficient to achieve a perfect extent of fairness, while a special case reduces to the classical notion of proportional fairness. Our work is motivated by pervasive ecological challenges faced by the waste management community as policymakers seek to reduce the number of recycling centers in the last few years. As a computational case study, applying our models on data for the state of Bavaria in Germany, we find that even after the closure of a moderate number of recycling centers, large degrees of access can be ensured, provided that the closures are conducted optimally. Fairness, however, is impacted more, with facilities in rural regions shouldering larger loads of visiting populations than those in urban regions. History: Accepted by Pascal Van Hentenryck, Area Editor for Computational Modeling: Methods & Analysis. Funding: Computer resources and support provided by the Erlangen Regional Computing Center are gratefully acknowledged. B. Singh was partially financially supported by the Bavarian State Ministry for Science and Art (Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst) under the Competence Network for Scientific High Performance Computing in Bavaria. Supplemental Material: The software that supports the findings of this study is available within the paper and its Supplemental Information ( https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/suppl/10.1287/ijoc.2022.0308 ) as well as from the IJOC GitHub software repository ( https://github.com/INFORMSJoC/2022.0308 ). The complete IJOC Software and Data Repository is available at https://informsjoc.github.io/ .