Robust cooperative maximal covering location problem: a case study of the locating Tele-Taxi stations in Tabriz, Iran

Abstract

Today, maximising the number of steady customers and consistency in meeting their needs are two important factors affecting the profitability of companies. Therefore, researchers are trying to model, study and analyse factors affecting the businesses. To this end and with regard to covering problem applications, this problem is inclusively studied in the operations research (OR) literature. This article proposes a novel maximal covering location problem (MCLP) in which different factors (capacity of facilities, budget, number of available facilities in different types) have been considered. To provide a real case problem, locating Tele-Taxi stations in Tabriz, Iran have been studied. Moreover, to analyse the effects of uncertainty in the rate of demand in each demand point and capacity of facilities as undeniable facts of real-world, the robust counterpart of the proposed model is developed. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis on the constant perturbation for uncertain parameters has been conducted.