  In a recent advance in the environmental justice literature, the Kolm-Pollak
Equally Distributed Equivalent (EDE) was introduced as the most principled
metric for ranking distributions of disamenities, such as air pollution,
radiation levels, or, in our case, distance from an essential service, when
equity is a concern. The Kolm-Pollak EDE incorporates both the center and the
spread of a distribution by penalizing inequality at a level prescribed by the
decision-maker via an aversion to inequality parameter, thereby capturing the
experience of an individual more accurately than the population mean. We
present, analyze, and computationally test a model for optimizing the
Kolm-Pollak EDE in the context of facility location, both with and without a
penalty term applied for the selection of less-suitable potential locations.
Extensive computational experiments demonstrate that, unlike other facility
location models that incorporate measures of equity, this model scales to
extremely large practical problem instances. Optimal solutions represent
significant improvements for the worst-off residents with respect to distance
from an open amenity, while also attaining a near-optimal "average" experience.
