An Approach To Public Facilities Location Problem Based On Multi-Agent System

Public facilities are an important element of inhabitant's living environments, and their locations and distributions will directly affect the functionality of the facilities. Currently, many approaches have been proposed to solve the location problem of public facilities, namely exact and heuristic ones. But these approaches all have certain limitations, they can only be applied to specific version of the location problem and it is also difficult to solve the location problem in dynamic systems.In recent years, scholars in many fields have paid more attention to Multi-agent system (abbreviated as MAS) for its unique ideas and powerful simulation function. It has been successfully applied in many fields in complex system simulation, especially in the field of geography. MAS is well adapted to dynamic changes in open systems, which is the exact problem that traditional location methods faced.In this thesis, an approach based on self-organized multi-agent system is proposed to solve the location problem. The main works in this thesis are summarized as follows:(1) The progresses on facility location, multi-agent system technology and facility location instance based on multi-agent system are reviewed and summarized in details.(2) Relevant theories on location problem of public facilities are summarized, including location principles, rules, common location model and their application domain.(3) The relevant theories of complex adaptive systems and multi-agent system are introduced, and several common multi-agent simulation platforms are compared with respect to their characteristics.(4) A self-organized approach for location problem is proposed, which integrates artificial potential field with multi-agent technology. In this method, the demands generate attractive field, facilities generate repulsive field, facilities move under the effect of the attraction and repulsion. The global system will evolve into equilibrium, and then the distribution of the facilities will be regarded as a solution to the location problem.(5) The relevance of the approach has been shown through several experiments.Finally, the findings of the thesis are summarized, and some representative issues for future investigation are highlighted.