Optimizing Location of New Public Schools in Town Planning Considering Supply and Demand

Schools are some of the most critical public facilities in urban and metropolitan areas. The location of schools not only affects the costs of construction and travel but also significantly affects the social welfare of the residents through its impact on education quality among other factors. The impact of school location on education quality and social welfare in general is controlled mainly by the impact of location on the balance between supply and demand, which directly affects the access of students to quality education. Therefore, selecting the location of new schools by considering the impact of location on both social and economic factors is a critical town planning decision as billions of dollars are spent every year to build new schools in major metropolitan areas across the world. However, despite the significant efforts made in previous studies, the existing school location optimization models are focused mainly on costs and efficiency as key decision objectives and little attention has been made to the impact of location on maintaining and improving the education quality by considering the balance between supply and demand. In this paper, we formulate a school facility location selection model as a multiperiod facility location problem, where the objective function attempts to optimize the location of new schools to minimize the excess demand in the school network by building schools at strategic locations, subject to budget constraints and zoning restrictions. This formulation incorporates real-life parameters, including the availability of land in different areas of a city, the fluctuation of land prices from one location to another, and the possibility of building different sizes of facilities in a certain location. The proposed model is formulated using mixed-integer linear programming and can be solved by off-the-shelf optimization solvers. An illustrative case study is presented, using a meshed grid made up of 400 zones, where the network characteristics are assumed known. The proposed model provides strategic planners with an original approach and a new perspective to model school location optimization problems. This approach contributes to the advancement of the provision in locating new schools over a planning period, by optimizing their supply-to-demand ratio, to improve social welfare.