Sustainable urban facility location: Minimising noise pollution and network congestion

This paper addresses a multi-objective facility location problem, concerning the location of noise-sensitive and noise-generating facilities in urban environments. To promote sustainable solutions, two main criteria are incorporated within the optimisation model: minimising total noise-threshold violation levels and the total system travel time on the underlying road network. A bi-level formulation is proposed, which is eventually re-formulated into a single-level model. The augmented epsilon-constraint method is implemented to yield non dominated solutions. A Benders-Decomposition approach is proposed to handle large instances of the problem. Numerical tests highlight the effectiveness of the proposed solution method in designing the layout of urban regions. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.