A comparative survey of service facility location problems

Determining the best location to serve companies' profitability and sustainability is becoming more crucial every day, since the rivalry between companies is getting more intense. The transformation of economies from manufacturing orientation towards service based activities has resulted in a growing contribution of the service based economy in gross domestic product and workforce of developing countries. These recent changes in the economy are indicators that service facility related location science has received greater interest. Service location problems has been studied since the 1900s and interest on these types of problems has started to grow especially after the aforementioned economic transformation in the 2000s. A large number of problems have been investigated for different service facilities. However, there is a need for a survey that systematically classifies these papers in order to comprehend them thoroughly due to their prominence and complexity. This paper examines 90 papers that have been published on service facility location problems since 2000. The paper presents a classification based on 19 main characteristics including key features and descriptive dimensions of location problems in order to develop a taxonomy from an operations research perspective to assist the location scientists and practitioners who work on service facility location problems. Furthermore, service facility location problems are categorized according to their application fields and investigated in detail relating to each characteristic. We also draw interesting comparisons of characteristics between facility location problems in different application fields and highlight directions for future research.