An Interactive Spatial Decision Support System Enabling Co-Located Collaboration using Tangible User Interfaces for the Multiple Capacitated Facility Location Problem

The Multiple Capacitated Facility Location Problem (MCFLP) is well-known and studied in the international literature optimization problem. The geographical information data of the enterprises' locations are usually either ignored by the modeler or entered manually in these systems. In this paper, a spatial Decision Support System (DSS) is designed and implemented enabling co-located collaboration using tangible user interfaces through a tabletop. The location of the enterprises and the demand nodes can be added with the use of interactive Google Maps. The DSS extracts the geographical information of the selected locations, find the distances between them and executes a dynamic approximation algorithm for this problem. The interactive spatial DSS has been implemented using Java, TUIO protocol and Google Maps. The tabletop offers a user-friendly interface that can be manipulated with human fingers and fiducials.