An-Approach to Solve a Bi-Objective Un-Capacitated Facility Location 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 facility location problem which includes assignment of sites to the selected number of customers from among the given number of potential sites, for their requirements but with the objectives of minimizing cost for satisfying demands of all sites and minimizing the maximum time needed to fulfill the requirements of all the sites along with some constraints. Thesis contains six chapters; first chapter is the introductory in nature and second chapter contains a brief review of literature related to this topic. In third and fourth chapter, un-capacitated facility location problem respectively. A heuristic approach consisting of a combination of add and drop rules incorporating NBHA (net benefit heuristic algorithm) and UFLTSA (un-capacitated facility location tabu search algorithm)has been used to find the set of efficient solutions.