Content area
Full Text
Abstract. This paper considers the Modular Capacitated Location Problem (MCLP) which consists of finding the location and capacity of the facilities, to serve a set of customers at a minimum total cost. Each customer has an associated demand and the capacity of each potential location must be chosen from a finite and discrete set of available capacities. Practical applications of this problem can be found in the location of warehouses, schools, health care services or other types of public services. For the MCLP different mixed integer linear programming models are proposed. The authors develop upper and lower bounds on the problem's optimal value and present computational results with randomly generated tests problems.
Keywords: capacitated location, Lagrangean heuristic, mixed integer linear programming
(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes formulae omitted.)
Introduction
For many organisations, a good location of facilities or plants such as public services, warehouses, factories, depots, etc., is vital to their success. Basically, a location problem consists of finding the location of facilities and their assignment to the customers in order to optimise certain objective. These problems have been widely studied. Valuable general references for facility location problems are to be found in (Daskin, 1995) or (Mirchandani and Francis, 1990), for example.
The applications of location models are not restricted to plant location alone. In fact, this type of model is applicable to problems in different areas such as distribution systems, telecommunication networks, machine replacement, etc.
In the Capacitated Plant Location Problem (CPLP) (Sridharan, 1995) each customer has an associated demand. Moreover, each potential location has a capacity, that is, an upper bound on the demand it can serve. The total costs consist of a fixed set-up cost for open each facility and assignment costs to serve all the customers' requirements from open facilities. Such costs may vary according to the location and size of the facilities. We can also consider that each customer may or may not be partially served by several facilities. The facilities in different locations can differ in size but, in some practical situations, it is often necessary to consider several possible sizes for each potential location. In order to deal with this situation we study the Modular Capacitated Location Problem, which offers several possible sizes for the capacity...