Alternative Approaches

The approaches outlined in the preceding pages are three of many that could be used for this problem. Other possibilities include the following:

 

Weight the locations of crimes by the severity of the crime that was reported there

This could address any problems with skewing toward locations where many petty crimes, but very few serious crimes, are committed.

Change the objective to maximizing the police station coverage of crime locations

Define coverage as being within a set distance from the location of a crime

Do not specify a number, p, of facilities to be located

Instead, add fj, the cost of constructing a facility at location j, to the objective function. Such an analysis could be useful if the University City government knows the cost of constructing, or purchasing, a new facility and wants to know how many it will need to adequately cover the crime locations.