locationallocation: solving Maximal Coverage Location-Allocation geospatial infrastructure assessment and planning problems

Giacomo Falchetta 

Assessing and planning infrastructure and networks over space conditional to a spatially distributed demand and with consideration of accessibility and spatial justice goals and under infrastructure allocation constraints is a key policy objective. Potential applications extend to the domains of public infrastructure assessment and planning (public services provision, e.g. transport, social services, healthcare, parks), urban environmental and climate risk reduction interventions, logistics and hubs allocation, commercial and strategic decisions. Here we introduce locationallocation, an R package to solve Maximal Coverage Location-Allocation problems using geospatial data in widely used R programming language geospatial libraries. The package allows to produce travel time maps and spatially optimizing the allocation of facilities in both continuous and discrete choice problems and based on spatial accessibility criteria weighted by one or more variables or a function of those. We demonstrate the use of package through an example of how it can be used to plan infrastructures that can tackle urban-scale climate risk through infrastructure assessment and spatial planning.