The geometrical location of information centers

摘要

The use of geometrical factors to locate information centers for a spatially distributed user population will be shown. The total amount of information for the community of users is considered to be predetermined. A proportion of that information is to be allocated to each information center created. An optimal user versus distance and contents of the center compromise will be obtained using standard mathematical programming techniques. An interesting theoretical situation results for those cases where the “satisfaction benefit” due to quantity of information increases more slowly than the quantity of information. For such cases, the optimal decentralization (or pluralization) is no decentralization at all—a single location results. A case study locating the Mathematics information of a University concludes the work.