A novel approach to delineating the service area of facilities in a network

Many research questions exist in a variety of network environments in the real world, such as delineating the service area of facilities distributed in a network. In this paper, with respect to the traditional method-the breadth-first search algorithm, a new method based on the shortest path algorithm is proposed to delineate service area. A series of experiments are conducted to compare the computational time between the proposed algorithm and the breadth-first search algorithm and the results demonstrate that, in most cases, the proposed one can save much more computational time, especially when the scale of road network or the impedance of the network center increases.