A New Formulation Approach for Location-Routing Problems

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Author
Toyoglu, H.
Karasan, O. E.
Kara, B. Y.
Date
2012Journal Title
Networks and Spatial Economics
ISSN
1566-113X (print) 1572-9427 (online)
Publisher
Springer
Volume
12
Issue
4
Pages
635 - 659
Language
English
Type
Article
Metadata
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http://hdl.handle.net/11693/21241Abstract
A Location-Routing Problem (LRP) combines two difficult problems, facility location and vehicle routing, and as such it is inherently hard to solve. In this paper, we propose a different formulation approach than the common arc-based product-flow (Arc-BPF) approach in the literature. We associate product amounts to the nodes of the network resulting in a node-based product-flow (Node-BPF) formulation. Our main objective is to develop LRP models with fewer constraints and variables, which can be solved more efficiently. To introduce the proposed approach, we reformulate a complex four-index Arc-BPF LRP model from the literature as a three-index Node-BPF model, which computationally outperforms the former. We then introduce a heuristic method.