This paper describes some models to assist with the location of Government Departments developed for the Property Services Agency of the British Government.
The models are concerned with allocating Departments to locations to minimize the combined costs, of accommodation, dislocation (i.e. moving Departments from their present location) and communication.
Our first model groups parts of Departments into clusters, using an extension of Euclidean Cluster Analysis, so that Departmental, groups communicating extensively with each other are allocated to the same cluster, as far as possible. We then use mathematical programming to allocate clusters to locations. The methods are an extension of those described by Beale and Tomlin [3].