Crowdsourcing planar facility location allocation problems

Facility location allocation is key to success of urban design, mainly in designing transport systems, finding locations for warehouse, fire stations and so on. The problem of determining locations of k facilities so that provides service to n customers, also known as p-median problems, is one of the well-known \(\mathcal NP\)-hard problems. Several heuristics have been proposed to solve location allocation problems, each of which has several limitations such as accuracy, time and flexibility, besides their advantages. In this paper, we propose to solve the p-median problems using crowdsourcing and gamification techniques. We present a crowdsourced game, called SolveIt, which employs wisdom and intelligence of the crowd to solve location allocation problems. We have presented a data model for representing p-median problems, designed and implemented the game and tested it using gold standards generated using a genetic algorithm tool. We have also compared the results obtained from SolveIt with the results of a well-known approach called Cooper. The evaluations show the accuracy and superiority of the results obtained from SolveIt players. We have also discussed the limitations and possible applications of the proposed approach.