A new data-driven framework for balancing user accessibility and facility load fairness

Speaker：

Bismark Singh

University of Southampton

Time：

Friday, 16:00-17:30

October 10, 2025

Online：

Zoom 712 322 9571 (BIMSA)

Title：

A new data-driven framework for balancing user accessibility and facility load fairness

Abstract:

Typically, within facility location problems, fairness is defined in terms of accessibility of users. However, for facilities perceived as undesirable by communities hosting them, fairness between the usage of facilities becomes especially important. Limited research exists on this notion of fairness. In a series of works, we have attempted to close this gap by developing new classes of combinatorial optimization models for the allocation of populations of users to facilities such that access for users is balanced with a fair utilization of facilities. The optimality conditions of the underlying nonconvex quadratic models state the precise balance between accessibility and fairness. Further, we define new axioms of fairness and a metric to quantify the extent to which fairness is achieved in both optimal and suboptimal allocations. We show that a continuous relaxation of our central model is sufficient to achieve a perfect extent of fairness, while a special case reduces to the classical notion of proportional fairness. We present computational results using actual data from the state of Bavaria in Germany. The main part of this work is based on two articles published with my students both in the INFORMS Journal on Computing. In ongoing work, we are studying supermodularity properties of this new class of objective functions.