Maximal expected covering location problem. Revisited

An attempt is made to relax three of Maximal Expected Coverage Location Problems MEXCLP assumptions: servers operate independently, servers have the same busy probabilities, and server busy probabilities are invariant with respect to their locations. We embed the hypercube queueing model in a single node substitution heuristic optimization procedure, to determine a set of server locations which 'maximize' the expected coverage. Our empirical findings indicate that there is disagreement between the expected coverage predicted by the MEXCLP model and the hypercube optimization procedure. There is substantial agreement, however, between the locations generated by the two procedures. We also consider a simple 'adjustment' to the MEXCLP model, based upon random sampling of servers without replacement; the same adjustment has been used previously to derive a hypercube approximation procedure.