Site selection
Choosing where to locate something by comparing candidate places against the criteria that matter, such as who they reach and what is already nearby.
Site selection is deciding where something should go. A shop, a charging point, a health centre, a school. The method is to define the criteria that matter, score candidate locations against them, and compare.
The criteria are usually a mix of reach and context. Reach is an accessibility question: how many people live within a fifteen minute walk or a ten minute drive, and who are they. Context is about what is already there: existing provision that would overlap, competing sites, the road and transport network, land availability and planning constraints.
The reason it is a spatial problem rather than a spreadsheet problem is that most of these criteria only exist as locations. Population within a catchment cannot be looked up in a table. It has to be calculated from where people live and how far they can travel, and it changes with every candidate site you test.