Locating Service Centres for a GSM Mobile Network

This paper describes a situation where a GSM mobile network manager wishes to locate some service centres so as to minimize the total cost of setting up of service centres as well as the travel cost. However, there are four categories of faults requiring their resolutions within different periods of time and consequently, different modes of travel for different faults are permissible. This results in a location problem among candidate sites which are nodes on more than one network. An air network for critical faults and a rail network for major and important faults become relevant. After a review of major location problem structures, the service centre location problem is formulated as a pure binary ILP and the optimal solution obtained using LINDO. An analysis is also performed to determine the sensitivity of the optimal solution to different office setup, air travel and rail travel Costs.