Locating waste pipelines to minimize their impact on marine environment

Abstract

A waste pipeline, considered as an undesirable facility, is to be located in a coastal region. Two criteria are taken into account, the Euclidean distance from a given set of protected areas (coral reefs and sandbanks) and a utility function related to the pipe length, both to be maximized. The paper describes a methodology to obtain an efficient set of points where the extreme of a marine pipeline should be located. Since the formulation of the model is based on the zone Voronoi diagram, the computational complexity of the solving procedure is low.