Intertemporal and Spatial Location of Disposal Facilities

This paper studies the optimal capacity and location of a sequence of landfills and points out the interactions between both decisions. The decision capacity has some spatial implications, because it afects the feasible region for the rest of landfills, and some temporal mplications, because the capacity determines the lifetime of the landfill and hence the instant of time where next landfills will need to be constructed. Some general properties of the solution are provided and interpreted from an economic point of view. The resulting problem turns out to be non-convex and therefore it can not be solved by conventional optimization techniques. Some global optimization methods are used to solve the problem in a particular case, in order to illustrate the behavior of the solution depending on parameter values