Pricing and location decisions in multi-objective facility location problem with M/M/m/k queuing systems

ABSTRACT

This article presents a new multi-objective model for a facility location problem with congestion and pricing policies. This model considers situations in which immobile service facilities are congested by a stochastic demand following M/M/m/k queues. The presented model belongs to the class of mixed-integer nonlinear programming models and NP-hard problems. To solve such a hard model, a new multi-objective optimization algorithm based on a vibration theory, namely multi-objective vibration damping optimization (MOVDO), is developed. In order to tune the algorithms parameters, the Taguchi approach using a response metric is implemented. The computational results are compared with those of the non-dominated ranking genetic algorithm and non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm. The outputs demonstrate the robustness of the proposed MOVDO in large-sized problems.

KEYWORDS:

• facility location
• multi-objective optimization
• pricing
• queuing theory
• vibration damping optimization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

R. Tavakkoli-Moghaddam http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6757-926X