A location-allocation heuristic for the capacitated multi-facility Weber problem with probabilistic customer locations


ALTINEL İ. K., Durmaz E., ARAS M. N., ÖZKISACIK K. C.

European Journal of Operational Research, cilt.198, sa.3, ss.790-799, 2009 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus) identifier identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 198 Sayı: 3
  • Basım Tarihi: 2009
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1016/j.ejor.2008.10.014
  • Dergi Adı: European Journal of Operational Research
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.790-799
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: Expected distance, Facility location-allocation, Heuristics, Probabilistic capacitated Weber problem
  • Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

The capacitated multi-facility Weber problem is concerned with locating m facilities in the Euclidean plane, and allocating their capacities to n customers at minimum total cost. The deterministic version of the problem, which assumes that customer locations and demands are known with certainty, is a non-convex optimization problem and difficult to solve. In this work, we focus on a probabilistic extension and consider the situation where the customer locations are randomly distributed according to a bivariate distribution. We first present a mathematical programming formulation, which is even more difficult than its deterministic version. We then propose an alternate location-allocation local search heuristic generalizing the ideas used originally for the deterministic problem. In its original form, the applicability of the heuristic depends on the calculation of the expected distances between the facilities and customers, which can be done for only very few distance and probability density function combinations. We therefore propose approximation methods which make the method applicable for any distance function and bivariate location distribution. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.