A location-driven approach for warehouse location problem

Abstract

After a large-scale disaster occurred, medical service centers are needed to provide appropriate medical treatments for injured patients. To support those medical service centers, a warehouse should be set up to stock medical supplies that can be distributed to medical service centers in different quantities in multiple periods. However, the delivery of medical supplies depends on practical environmental conditions. In practice, the cost including the travel time and monetary cost from the warehouse to the medical service center presents a complex relationship. The existing methods do not consider this complex relationship. To overcome the pitiful of the existing methods, we propose a location-driven method. To implement the proposed location-driven method, three numerical algorithms are considered. Among them, the fixed-point-based heuristic algorithm is compared with the existing two algorithms to illustrate its superiority. Also, the bootstrap resampling technique is applied to obtain a reasonable region for improving the flexibility of locating the warehouse. To illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method, several simulation studies are considered. The computational results show the advantages of the proposed method in determining the warehouse location and identifying the reasonable region for locating the warehouse.

Keywords:

• Medical service center
• facility location problem
• fixed point
• Bootstrap

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (NRF-2017R1A2B4004169) and the China-Korea cooperation program managed by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the NRF (NRF-2018K2A9A2A06019662).