A branch‐and‐bound method for use in planning regional wastewater treatment systems is extended to include a methodology for generating and evaluating alternative plans. Since many planning issues are related to a specific configuration of regional facilities, economic trade‐offs among alternative plans are evaluated using imputed values of individual facilities or groups of them. The imputed values, or bounds on them, are calculated from information contained in the branch‐and‐bound tree using an ‘imputed value incidence matrix.’ The general approach, which can be applied to other public facility location problems, is designed to aid an analyst in gaining more insights into the problem under study than obtainable from conventional optimization methods. The procedure is designed for use within a larger planning process where the steps are to generate, to evaluate, and to elaborate on alternative plans. The method is illustrated using the regional wastewater system for DuPage County, Illinois.
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Nakamura et al. (1979) studied this question.