Special Issue of Socio-Economic Planning Sciences

Location Analysis for Public Sector Decision-Making in Uncertain Times

Guest Editors:
Giuseppe Bruno, University of Naples “Federico II”,Italy
Andrea Genovese, University of Sheffield, UK

Socio-Economic Planning Sciences will publish a special issue on recent development in Location Analysis for Public Sector Decision-Making. The goal is to compile state-of-the art research, spanning modeling, theory, empirical studies, application and case studies in this research area. We seek operations research oriented contributions that are rigorously executed, clearly and succinctly written, and innovative relative to what is currently known. In light of the scope of SEPS, all papers must clearly demonstrate the relevance of their contributions with respect to the public sector.

A facility location problem is aimed at finding the best position for a set of facilities within a given region in order to optimize a specific objective function. In the last decades, there have been many applications concerning the location of public-sector facilities (i.e. schools or post offices, emergency services, fire stations, hospitals, ambulances). These models represent a viable decision support tool for institutions that are planning to expand their capacity in a given region and/or market.

This very well established research strand, however, has to take into account the changing and uncertain nature of our times. Indeed, in recent years, due to the global recession and the general interest to reduce costs and improve efficiency, public sector bodies have been more interested in the rationalization of the current position of active facilities (either closing down some of them or re-organizing the overall service supply system). In this context, decisions may depend on various factors such as the nature of the service and the characteristics of the demand.

Considering this context, the special issue will be welcoming papers related to applications and theory of Location Analysis, with a special emphasis on contributions addressing contemporary challenges.

All manuscripts should be submitted electronically via the Elsevier Editorial System (EES)http://ees.elsevier.com/seps. You must select Location Analysis as the Article Type to make sure that your paper will be considered for the special issue. The submission deadline is 30 November 2014. The plan is to publish the special issue in early 2016. Researchers from all relevant disciplines are invited to consider this special issue as an outlet to publish their quality work on this topic of increasing significance. Inquiries on the special issue can be directed to the guest editors (giuseppe.bruno@unina.it, a.genovese@sheffield.ac.uk).