Planar maximal covering with ellipses

  • Authors:
  • Mustafa S. Canbolat;Michael von Massow

  • Affiliations:
  • DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ont., Canada L8S 4M4;DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ont., Canada L8S 4M4

  • Venue:
  • Computers and Industrial Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We consider a maximal covering location problem on the plane, where the objective is to provide maximal coverage of weighted demand points using a set of ellipses at minimum cost. The problem involves selecting k out of m ellipses. The problem occurs naturally in wireless telecommunications networks as coverage from some transmission towers takes an elliptical shape. A mixed integer nonlinear programming formulation (MINLP) for the problem is presented but MINLP solvers fail to solve it in a reasonable time. We suggest a Simulated Annealing heuristic as an alternate approach for solving the problem. Our computational results employing the heuristic show very good results with efficient processing times. We also discuss an extension to the problem where coverage occurs on a spherical surface and show that it can be solved with the same heuristic.