College - Author 1
College of Engineering
Department - Author 1
Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department
Advisor
Zhiyuan Wei, College of Engineering, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department
Funding Source
Cal Poly's College of Engineering Dean's Innovation Fund, Paul & Sandi Bonderson, Kim Vorrath, and The Sprague Foundation
Date
10-2025
Abstract/Summary
Facility location optimization is a foundational area in operations research and data analytics that is concerned with determining the optimal placement of facilities to serve a spatially distributed demand. However, traditional facility location decision is often approached from a centralized perspective, where the facility planner dictates the allocation of customers to facilities. In this setting, it is typically assumed that customers patronize the nearest facility, and their preferences are not explicitly modeled. This traditional decision-making framework may not accurately reflect real-world dynamics where customers may choose facilities based on a variety of factors beyond proximity. Thus, this project aims to develop a novel decentralized decision-making framework for facility location modeling that explicitly considers people's actual mobility patterns and behavioral preferences. By accounting for people's nuanced mobility patterns in facility location optimization, the decentralized facility location model can provide more realistic and precise decision support for stakeholders, such as city planners and policy makers, with the goal of improving access to essential services. Ultimately, this project offers unique opportunities to leverage real human mobility data in the development of a data-driven, optimization-based framework for facility location problems.
October 1, 2025.
Included in
URL: https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/ceng_surp/150