Location of Competitive Service Centers for Reducing City Traffic

Distribution of goods and services in cities is of utmost importance. Selecting appropriate venues for different service centers in a city not only enables the citizens to access these services much more easily، but also reduces the traffic load caused by trips made to reach them. Unfortunately، the lack of a correct urban planning has led to inappropriate formation of many cities around the world in terms of the locations assumed for different service centers. Since the private sector has been given the responsibility to construct most of these centers، changing their current locations may be restricted due to legal obligations. Therefore، it seems necessary for the government to construct new service centers with high competitive facilities to attract customers and to compete with those built by the private sector. In this paper، the selection of appropriate locations to construct new service centers has been studied. Such locations have been selected in a way to fulfill goals such as rapid and easy accessibility for the customers and reduction of traffic drawbacks caused by the related trips. In this regard، a model for service centers with restricted capacity has been designed and a parallel simulated annealing algorithm has been proposed to solve it. Finally، the proposed algorithm has been utilized to locate the health centers around the city of Isfahan and its efficiency has been investigated. The findings highlight the accuracy and speed of the proposed algorithm in location of the health centers of Isfahan.