Title: A two-stage method for the capacitated multi-facility location-allocation problem

Authors: Martino Luis; Chandra A. Irawan; Arif Imran

Addresses: College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4, 4QF, UK ' Nottingham University Business School China, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, 199 Taikang East Road, Ningbo 315100, China ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Institut Teknologi Nasional, Bandung 40124, Indonesia; School of Industrial Engineering, Telkom University, Bandung 40257, Indonesia

Abstract: This paper examines the capacitated planar multi-facility location-allocation problem, where the number of facilities to be located is specified and each of which has a capacity constraint. A two-stage method is put forward to deal with the problem where in the first stage a technique that discretises continuous space into discrete cells is used to generate a relatively good initial facility configurations. In stage 2, a variable neighbourhood search (VNS) is implemented to improve the quality of solution obtained by the previous stage. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using benchmark datasets from the literature. The numerical experiments show that the proposed method yields competitive results when compared to the best known results from the literature. In addition, some future research avenues are also suggested.

Keywords: capacitated; continuous location problem; heuristics; variable neighbourhood search; VNS.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2019.101200

International Journal of Operational Research, 2019 Vol.35 No.3, pp.366 - 377

Received: 05 Nov 2015
Accepted: 20 Jul 2016
Published online: 29 Jul 2019 *

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