Abstract
For the facility location problem under extreme environment a two-stage fuzzy approach is developed. On the first stage, the fuzzy multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) model for evaluation of the selection ranking index of a candidate service site is created. For this purpose the triangular fuzzy Choquet averaging (TFCA) operator is constructed. Interaction attributes, influencing the service centers’ selection process, are defined. Interaction indexes between attributes and importance values of attributes are taken into account in the construction of the 2-order additive triangular fuzzy valued fuzzy measure (TFVFM). On the second stage, based on the TFCA operator, a new objective function - selection ranking index of candidate sites is constructed. We consider also two classical objective functions - total cost for opening of service centers and number of agents needed to operate the opened service centers. A new objective function together with latter ones creates the multi-objective fuzzy facility location set covering problem. A Pareto front for this problem is constructed. A simulation example of emergency service facility location planning for a city is considered. The example deals with the problem of planning fire station locations for serving emergency situations in specific demand points – critical infrastructure objects.
Keywords
Introduction
Timely servicing from emergency service centers to the affected geographical areas (demand points, critical infrastructure objects) is a key task of the emergency management system. Scientific research in this area focuses on distribution networks decision-making problems, which are known as a Facility Location Problem (FLP) ([4, 9] and others).
Location planning for service centers in extreme environment is a complex decision that involves consideration of multiple interaction attributes like maximum customer coverage, minimum service costs, least impacts on geographical points’ residents and environment, and conformance to freight regulations of these points. FLP’s models have to support the generation of optimal locations of service centers in complex and uncertain situations. There are several publications about application of fuzzy methods in the FLP under uncertainty environment. However, all of them have a common approach. They represent experts evaluations of modelling parameters and develop solving methods for facility location problems called in this case fuzzy facility location problem (FFLP) ([14, 20] and others). In this work we consider a two-stage model of FFLP based on the fuzzy aggregation operator’s approach [6] for the optimal selection of facility location centers in extreme environment. As a result, dependence and interactions between attributes hold in MAGDM models. In 1974, Sugeno [21] introduced the concept of non-additive measure (fuzzy measure), which is characterized by monotonicity instead of additivity property. It is the most effective tool to model interaction phenomena [11, 19] and deal with such decision problems [10, 12]. At the first stage: triangular fuzzy valued fuzzy measure and its associated probabilities on a finite set are developed; Choquet integral (Choquet, 1954) with respect to triangular fuzzy valued fuzzy measure (TFVFM) is defined (Section 3). In Section 4: Experts’ evaluations on candidate service sites with respect to attributes and interaction indexes between attributes and important values of attributes in triangular fuzzy numbers are presented; interactions between attributes and important values of attributes are taken into account in the construction of the 2-order additive TFVFM as an uncertainty pole of experts evaluations. Calculation scheme of selection ranking index of a candidate site by the TFCA operator is constructed in Section 5. The fuzzy multi-attribute decision making model for the evaluation of the selection ranking index of a service site is also created in Section 5. At the second stage, based on the TFCA operator, a new objective function - total selection ranking index of candidate sites is constructed (Section 6). This function together with two classical objective functions, minimization of total cost for opening of service centers and minimization of number of agents needed to operate the opened service centers, creates the fuzzy multi-objective facility location set covering problem (Section 6). A simulation model of emergency service facility location planning for a city is considered in Section 7. The example deals with the problem of planning fire station locations for serving emergency situations in specific demand points – critical infrastructure objects. The main results of the work are presented in the conclusive section.
On the lattice of triangular fuzzy numbers and fuzzy probability averaging operators
The fuzzy numbers (FNs) [7] have been studied by many authors. They can be represented in a more complete way as an imprecision variable of the incomplete expert information. It can consider the maximum and minimum and the possibility that the interval values may occur.
Below, we review arithmetic operations for triangular FNs (TFNs) for which in
We define:
We say that
The set of all TFNs is denoted by Ψ and nonnegative TFNs (a
i
≥ 0) by
Analogously to known probability averaging (PA) operator, based on Def. 1, we present the equivalent form of the fuzzy PA (FPA) operator as an extension of the PA operator on Ψ. If a
i
∈ Ψ ; i = 1, . . . , n, then
It is easy to prove that if arguments in the FPA present real numbers –
As a result, we have required that an aggregation operator satisfies three conditions: monotonicity, boundedness (therefore idempotency) and symmetricity. Such operators are called averaging (mean) aggregation operators. The objective properties required from aggregation operators are presented in [1, 24] and others. One of the main aims of this work is to construct new extensions of the FPA operators when the probability measure will be changed by the monotone measure [5]. As usual, in FFLPs there are no existing statistical data for definitions of model’s input parameters probability distributions. It is not possible to use probability analysis in aggregation process of the optimization models and objective functions for the solution of a FFLP problem. Therefore, we use experts’ evaluation in a fuzzy probability approach in such cases.
We introduce the definition of a fuzzy measure[5, 21] adapted to the case of a finite referential:
g (Ø) = 0 ; g (S) =1 ; ∀ A, B ⊆ S if A ⊆ B, then g (A) ≤ g (B).
A FM is a normalized and monotone set function. It can be considered as an extension of the probability concept, where additivity is replaced by the weaker condition of monotonicity.
We consider some aspects of a finite Choquet Integral in aggregations.
There exist many works on extensions of the Choquet averaging operator for fuzzy arguments. In general, the extensions are constructed on combination of the Zadeh’s extension principle and a Mobius transform of the fuzzy measure ([16, 17, 19 and others). For our reasoning rbased on the Def. 1 rwe present an extension of the CA operator on the lattice Ψ. We consider an extension of the CA operator for a TFVFM:
It is easy to prove that the TFCA operator is an averaging aggregation operator. If in (5) a TFVFM is a TFVFM then the TFCA value coincides with the TFPA value and if in (5) a TFVFM is a FM and arguments represent real nonnegative numbers –
In general, the possible orderings of the elements of S are given by the permutations of a set with n elements, which form the group S n . Now we consider a definition of associated probabilities induced by a fuzzy measure g on S.
Analogous results may be received for the TFVFM -
The fuzzy measure can represent flexibly a certain kind of an interaction among the decision attributes and can vary from redundancy (negative interaction) to synergy (positive interaction) [13].
Any fuzzy measure (any set function) g can be uniquely expressed in terms of its Mobius representation by
Analogously from Def. 5, a fuzzy measure will be defined by
The overall importance value of an attribute s
i
∈ S is called its Shapley value, defined by
The interaction index of two attributes s
i
, s
j
∈ S, i ≠ j is defined by
Using mathematical induction it is easy to prove for a 2-order additive FM and ∀σ = {σ (1) , . . . , σ (n)} ∈ S
n
, i = 1, . . . , n,
Analogously, we have:
The overall fuzzy importance value of an attribute s
i
∈ S is called its fuzzy Shapley value (FSV), defined by
The fuzzy interaction index of two attributes s
i
, s
j
∈ S is defined by
It is easy to verify that
For the definition of APC {P
σ
} σ∈S
n
of the FM g in the real experiment, experts are able to evaluate importance values {I
i
} and interaction indexes {I
ij
} of attributes. It will more convenient from the point of intellectual activity of experts if experts present their knowledge in fuzzy terms, such as “very low”, “low” and so on (Table 1). Therefore, in the aggregation procedure, to construct TFVFM and its associated TFVPMs is more natural. For the definition of associated TFVPMs by the fuzzy importance values
Fuzzy terms and their fuzzy ratings.
If c = 0 in (16), then fuzzy interaction indexes are not taken into account in associated fuzzy probabilities. Associated fuzzy probabilities are depended only on Shapley indexes and the TFVFM is a TFVPM. In such case in calculations we consider probabilistic environment.
At first, we are focusing on a multi-attribute group decision making approach for location planning for selection of service centers under uncertain and extreme environment. We develop a fuzzy multi-attribute decision making approach for the service center location selection problem for which a fuzzy probability aggregation operators’ approachis used.
The formation of expert’s input data for construction of attributes is an important task of the centers’ selection problem. To decide on the location of service centers, it is assumed that a set of candidate sites already exists. This set is denoted by CC = {cc1, cc2, . . . , cc m }, where we can locate service centers and S = {s1, s2, . . . , s n } be the set of all attributes (transformed in benefit attributes) which define CCs selection. For example: 1. s1 =” post disaster access by public and special transport modes to the candidate site”; 2. s2 =” post disaster security of the candidate site from accidents, theft and vandalism”; 3. s3 =” post disaster connectivity of the location with other modes of transport (highways, railways, seaport, airport etc.)”; 4. s4 =” costs in vehicle resources, required products and etc. for the location of CCs in candidate site”; 5. s5 = “impact of the candidate site on the environment, such as important objects of Critical Infrastructure and others”; 6. s6 =” distances of the candidate site from the central locations”; 7. s7 =” distances of the candidate site from demand points”; 8. s8 = “availability of raw material and labor resources in the candidate site”; 9. s9 =” ability to conform to sustainable freight regulations imposed by emergency managers post disaster for e.g. restricted delivery hours, special delivery zones”; 10. s10 =” ability to increase size to accommodate growing demands post disaster” and others.
Let us assume that DP = {dp1, dp2, . . . , dp
l
} is the set of all demand points (customers). Let
In fuzzy set theory [7, 25] conversion scales are applied to transform the fuzzy terms into triangular fuzzy numbers. In our approach, we apply a rating scale of 1–9 as semantic form of fuzzy terms of the linguistic variables: attribute’s valuation, importance value of an attribute and interaction index of attributes. Table 1 presents the linguistic variables fuzzy terms and their semantic ratings.
The proposed framework of location planning for candidate sites comprises the following steps:
Step 1: Selection of location attributes. Involves the selection of location attributes for evaluating potential locations for candidate sites. These attributes are obtained from literature review, and discussion with experts and members of the city transportation group. We use 10 attributes defined above. It can be seen that attributes s3 and s4 belong to the cost category, that is, the lower the value, the more preferable the alternative for the best location. The remaining attributes are benefit type attributes, which means the higher the value, the more preferable the alternative is for selection.
Step 2: Selection of candidate location sites. Involves selection of potential locations for implementing service centers. The decision makers use their knowledge, prior experience with transportation or other conditions of the geographical area of extreme events and the presence of sustainable freight regulations to identify candidate locations for implementing service centers. For example, if certain areas are restricted for delivery by municipal administration, then these areas are barred from being considered as potential locations for implementing urban service centers. Ideally, the potential locations are those that cater for the interest of all city stakeholders, which are city residents, logistics operators, municipal administrations etc.
Step 3: Locations evaluation using fuzzy aggregation approach. The third step involves evaluation of candidate location sites against the selected attributes (step 1) using the technique of fuzzy approach of alternatives selection.
Step 3.1. Assignment of ratings to the attributes with respect to the candidate sites. Let
Step 3.2. Compute aggregated fuzzy ratings for the attributes and the candidate sites. Let the fuzzy ratings of all experts be described by positive ratings (Table 1)
The aggregated fuzzy weights of attributes
Step 3.3. Compute the fuzzy decision matrix. The fuzzy decision matrix
Step 3.4. Normalize the fuzzy decision matrix. The raw data are normalized using a linear scale transformation to bring the various attributes scales onto a comparable scale. The normalized fuzzy decision matrix
Step 4: Identify constructive TFVFM which takes into account attributes fuzzy importance values and attributes fuzzy interactions. It is usual that attributes of fuzzy importance values
According to Section 4 we construct the associated TFVPMs (16)–(18) of a TFVFM.
Step 5: Compute selection ranking index of candidate sites by the TFCA operator.
Our task is to build aggregation operators’ approach, for which each candidate site cc
i
, (i = 1, . . . , m), aggregates presented objective and subjective data into scalar values – site’s selection ranking index. This aggregation we define as the TFCA operator’s value:
In this Section we are focusing on the multi-objective optimization model [8] for the location set covering problem (LSCP). LSCP was proposed by C. Toregas and C. Revell in 1972, which seeks a solution for locating the least number of facilities to cover all demand points within the service distance. Different aggregation operators applied in fuzzy extensions of LSCP for facility location were described in [6]. In this work, using a new aggregation approach, we construct new fuzzy LSCP model for emergency service facility location planning.
If x = {x1, x2, . . . , x
m
} is Boolean decision vector, which defines some selection from candidate sites CC = {cc1, cc2, . . . , cc
m
} for facility location, we can build sites’ selection ranking index as a linear sum of triangular fuzzy values -
For the exact solution of the problem (24)–(27) an ɛ-constraint approach is developed. A Pareto front is constructed.
We illustrate the effectiveness of the constructed fuzzy optimization model by the numerical example. Let us consider an emergency management administration of Tbilisi (Georgia) city that wishes to locate some fire stations with respect to timely servicing of critical infrastructure objects. Assume that there are 30 demand points (critical infrastructure objects) and 8 candidate facility sites (fire stations) in the urban area. Let us have 4 experts from Emergency Management Agency (EMA) of the city of Tbilisi for evaluation of the travel times and ratings values of candidate sites, interaction indexes and importance values of attributes. The travel times between demand points and candidate sites are evaluated in triangular fuzzy numbers (evaluated in minutes, omitted because the matrix of fuzzy travel times has large dimensions). According to the standards of the EMA, let the principle of location fire stations be that the fire station can reach the area edge within 5 minutes after receiving the dispatched instruction. Therefore, we set covering radius T = 5 minutes. Minimal possibilistic level λ is equal to 0.9.
Based on the semantic form (Table 1) each expert e
k
(k = 1, 2 , 3, 4) with the same “high” rating presented the ratings
First expert’s evaluations -
First expert’s evaluations -
First expert’s evaluations: fuzzy importance values
Based on Section 5, the software is developed, in which the steps 1–5, mathematical programing problem (24)–(27) and ɛ-constraint approach are realized.
The system is interactive with respect to optimization of input data and in a certain extent it is remarkable for intellectual work.
Experts evaluated cc-costs C
j
and cc-agents M
j
(see criteria z2 and z3 in the model (24)–(27), respectively). Coefficients in the objective function z2 are presented in thousand units. As it was mentioned, movement fuzzy times between demand points and candidate sites
Using the software, the normalized fuzzy decision matrix is received; matrix of normalized attributes, fuzzy importance values and fuzzy attributes interaction indexes are also received; the mathematical programming problem (18) is solved (c = 0.02102) and the values of the associated TFVPMs are calculated (calculations are omitted); selection ranking indexes of candidate sites are calculated by the TFCA operator (Table 4). At the end, the Fuzzy Multi-objective Emergency Service Facility Location Set Covering Problem (24)–(27) is constructed:
Fuzzy selection ranking indexes of candidate sites
After checking all 28 = 258 possible variants of constraints of the problem (28) we receive the following twelve coverings (Table 5):
Coverings and Pareto solutions
Cov1: {cc1, cc5, cc8}, Cov2: {cc2, cc3, cc7}, Cov3: {cc3, cc4, cc7},
Cov4: {cc3, cc5, cc8}, Cov5: {cc3, cc6, cc7}, Cov6: {cc3, cc6, cc8},
Cov7: {cc3, cc7, cc8}, Cov8: {cc4, cc6, cc7}, Cov9: {cc1, cc2, cc5, cc7},
Cov10: {cc1, cc5, cc6, cc7}, Cov11: {cc2, cc4, cc5, cc8}, Cov12: {cc4, cc5, cc6, cc8}.
In the TFCA aggregation example there exist 6 Pareto solutions - Cov1, Cov2, Cov3, Cov6, Cov7, Cov8. It is clear that increasing the service centers selection ranking index of covering in Pareto solutions gives more worse level of the second objective function – the total cost needed for opening of service centers or of the third objective function – number of agents needed for operating the opened service centers. But the decision on the choice of the fire stations as service centers depends on the decision making person’s preferences with respect to risks of administrative actions.
Of course, elimination of the fire is extreme process and the reliability of choice of service centers is envisaged in Pareto solutions. Notwithstanding, if we had to consider problem (28) without TFCA aggregations (interacting attributes), i.e. we would have two-criteria (z2, z3) classical FLSC problem, then we would have only one Pareto solution Cov3, having minimal cost and number of agents. This covering also enters into Pareto solution of fuzzy-FLSC problem, where its selection ranking index is rather low. From this comparison the advantage of the new approach is clear.
For the facility location problem under extreme conditions a two-stage fuzzy approach is developed. On the first stage, the Fuzzy Multi-Attribute Group Decision Making model for evaluation of the selection ranking index of a candidate service site is evaluated by the TFCA operator. For the construction of the TFCA operator the following steps are undertaken: 1. The Interaction attributes, which act on the service centers’ selection process, are revealed. 2. Experts’ evaluations on candidate service sites with respect to attributes and interaction indexes between attributes and importance values of attributes in triangular fuzzy numbers are evaluated by the experts. 3. Interactions indexes between attributes and important values of attributes which are taken into account in the construction of the 2-order additive triangular fuzzy valued fuzzy measure (TFVFM). On the second stage, based on the TFCA operator, a new criterion is constructed that maximizes selection ranking index of candidate sites. This criterion together with two classical criteria – which minimize the total cost for opening of service centers and number of agents needed for operating the opened service centers, creates the fuzzy multi-objective facility location set covering problem. A simulation example of emergency service facility location planning for a city is considered. The example deals with the problem of planning fire station locations for serving emergency situations in specific demand points – critical infrastructure objects.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation of Georgia (SRNSFG) [FR-18-466].
