New variants of the covering location problem: Modeling and a two-stage genetic algorithm

In this paper, we are interested to develop new models with reference to classical ones existent for covering and location problems. These models aim to improve the coverage and the satisfaction of demand on Radio Network of Cellular Mobile Communication Systems and wireless sensors networks. First, we propose a new definition of a General Covering Problem that generalizes both the classical total and maximal covering problems. We propose two mathematical linear models that take into account station assignment capacity and signal degradation constraints. In order to solve this proposed problem variant, we propose in addition a two-stage Genetic Algorithm (GA) combining location decisions and heuristic-based Base Stations (BS) allocation for users. Experimental study is conducted to compare Mathematical models and GA methods showing satisfactory results.