Efficient Solutions for the Multi-Objective Transportation Problem

Abstract

Facility location, also known as location analysis, is a branch of operations research concerning itself with mathematical modeling and solution of problems concerning the placement of facilities in order to minimize transportation costs, avoid placing hazardous materials near housing, outperform competitor’s facilities, etc. In a simple facility location problem, a single facility is to be placed, with the only optimization criterion being the minimization of the sum of distances from a given set of point sites. More complex problems considered in this discipline include the placement of multiple facilities, constraints on the locations of facilities, and more complex optimization criteria. Present thesis deals with a real life example of facility location problem which is basically a warehouse location problem which includes assignment of ration shops to the selected number of sites from among the given number of potential sites, for their requirements but with the objectives of minimizing cost for satisfying demands of all ration shops and minimizing the maximum time needed to fulfill the requirements of all the ration shops along with some constraints. Thesis contains three chapters; first chapter is the introductory in nature and also contains a brief review of literature related to this topic. In second and third chapter, un-capacitated warehouse location problem and capacitated warehouse location problem have been considered respectively. A heuristic approach consisting of a combination of add and drop rules incorporating Tabu search has been used to find the set of efficient solutions.