3.1. Introduction

Public services occupy an important place in modern societies. We are born in a hospital, we go to school, we benefit from transportation infrastructures and emergency services, we communicate by mail, telephone and Internet, we go to a city hall for anything to do with civil status, our household garbage is collected, we are buried in a cemetery, etc. One of the challenges facing contemporary society is to reach a correct adequacy between its members' needs and the services that they offer. This adequacy has several facets and concerns: the identification of needs, the selection of those that should be satisfied, the way in which service providers will be organized and controlled, the arbitrage between users, the funding of these activities, the impact on the physical and human environment, etc. All these issues open the door for large debates in political, social, economic, ethical, etc., areas.

A question of particular interest to the geographer throughout these discussions is the spatial adequacy between supply and demand, which means the choice of the location of the services and their geographical coverage. The goal of this chapter is to show how operations research methods can provide answers to these questions. The problem is prevalent in economically developed regions. Indeed, most of these regions are faced with huge budget (and debt) control problems that require, in principle, the best possible allocation of public money. Moreover, because of the emergence of supranational institutions (European Union,...