Double coverage versus allocation approach in emergency public service system design

The paper deals with the public service system design, in which the generalized utility is to be maximized. The generalized utility defined for a public service system assumes that user's utility comes generally from more than one located service center, on the contrary to the former formulations, where only one service center was taken into account as a source of individual user's utility. This concept of the generalized utility is compared to the well-known double coverage approach from the point of possible mutual interchange of mentioned approaches. We found the conditions, under which the generalized utility approach can be replaced by the double covering approach.