"Growing transportation costs and tight delivery schedules mean that good locational decisions are more crucial than ever in the success or failure of industrial and public projects. The development of realistic location models is an essential phase in every locational decision process. Especially when dealing with geometric representations of continuous (planar) location model problems, the geographical reality must be incorporated.".

"This text develops the mathematical implications of barriers to the geometric and analytical characteristics of continuous location problems. Besides their relevance in the application of location theoretic results, location problems with barriers are also very interesting from a mathematical point of view. The nonconvexity of distance measures in the presence of barriers leads to nonconvex optimization problems.

Most of the classical methods in continuous location theory rely heavily on the convexity of the objective function and will thus fail in this context. On the other hand, general methods in global optimization capable of treating nonconvex problems ignore the geometric characteristics of the location problems considered. Theoretic as well as algorithmic approaches are utilized to overcome the described difficulties for the solution of location problems with barriers.

Depending on the barrier shapes, the underlying distance measure, and type of objective function, different concepts are conceived to handle the nonconvexity of the problem." "This book will appeal to scientists, practitioners, and graduate students in operations research, management science, and mathematical sciences."--BOOK JACKET.