A capacitated facility location problem with constrained backlogging probabilities

Abstract

One of the assumptions of the capacitated facility location problem (CFLP) is that demand is known and fixed. Most often, this is not the case when managers take some strategic decisions such as locating facilities and assigning demand points to those facilities. In this paper we consider demand as stochastic and we model each of the facilities as an independent queue. Stochastic models of manufacturing systems and deterministic location models are put together in order to obtain a formula for the backlogging probability at a potential facility location. Several solution techniques have been proposed to solve the CFLP. One of the most recently proposed heuristics, a reactive greedy adaptive search procedure, is implemented in order to solve the model formulated. We present some computational experiments in order to evaluate the heuristics’ performance and to illustrate the use of this new formulation for the CFLP. The paper finishes with a simple simulation exercise.

Keywords:

• Location
• Queuing
• Greedy heuristics
• Simulation

Acknowledgments

This research has been possible thanks to the grant SFRH/BD/2916/2000 from the Ministério da Ciência e da Tecnologia, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia of the Portuguese government and grant SEC2003-1991 from the Ministry of Education and Science, Spain.