Facility Location Problem: A Case Study of School Consolidation

This chapter studies the facility location problem and demonstrates its application through a real-life case of school consolidation. India has a large number of schools primarily established under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, a flagship programme of the Government of India to promote accessibility. A large number of schools (including many small size schools) have been established to enhance accessibility, but it is difficult to provide good teaching and infrastructural resources in all schools. In recent years, the focus has shifted toward improving the quality of education delivery. Hence, there is a need to merge small schools to have better facilities at the expense of accessibility. However, accessibility cannot be compromised as it may create issues related to safe commutes to school and eventually lead to dropouts in some cases. Dropouts would violate the government's aim of universalization of education. The process of merging small schools and assigning students to new (alternate) schools is known as school consolidation. The school consolidation problem is formulated as an integer linear program to minimize the number of schools in operation and the total student disruption considering the accessibility and capacity requirements. Thus, the problem has multiple objectives and is solved using lexicographic ordering in two stages along with the ε-constraint method. The models have been demonstrated in a case study of Belgaum district in Karnataka, India. The number of schools closed and the average additional travel distance varies with the spatial distribution of schools and their enrollment. The results indicate an average additional travel between 200 and 700 m in the first stage of the model and 150 m to 350 m in the second stage of the model for different blocks in the district.