Obstacle Avoidance and Travel Path Determination in Facility Location Planning

This research finds a solution methodology for determining optimal travel path to and from existing facilities and corresponding location of a new facility having physical flow interaction between them in different degrees translated into associated weights, in presence of barriers impeding the shortest flow-path involving straight-line distance metric. The proposed methodology considers all types of quadrilateral barriers or forbidden region configurations to generalize, to by-pass these obstacles, and adopts a scheme of searching through the vertices of these quadrilaterals to determine the alternative shortest flow-path for optimal location of facilities based on weighted-distance computation algorithm with minimum summation or mini-sum objective. Congruence testing has been carried out for reconfiguring complex obstacle geometry as an equivalent quadrilateral. This procedure of obstacle avoidance is completely new. Software, DANSORK, has been developed to facilitate computations for the new search algorithm and test results have been presented based on computations using this software.