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A natural extension of point facility location problems are those problems in which facilities are extensive, i.e. those that can not be represented by isolated points but as some dimensional structures such as straight lines, segments of lines, polygonal curves or circles. In this paper a review of the existing work on the location of extensive facilities in continuous spaces is given. Gaps in the knowledge are identified and suggestions for further research are made.
In this paper we consider the location of stops along the edges of an already existing public transportation network. This can be the introduction of bus stops along some given bus routes, or of railway stations along the tracks in a railway network. The positive effect of new stops is given by the better access of the potential customers to their closest station, while the increasement of travel time caused by the additional stopping activities of the trains leads to a negative effect. The goal is to cover all given demand points with a minimal amount of additional traveling time, where covering may be defined with respect to an arbitrary norm (or even a gauge). Unfortunately, this problem is NP-hard, even if only the Euclidean distance is used. In this paper, we give a reduction to a finite candidate set leading to a discrete set covering problem. Moreover, we identify network structures in which the coefficient matrix of the resulting set covering problem is totally unimodular, and use this result to derive efficient solution approaches. Various extensions of the problem are also discussed.