The problem of an expanding chain (it already has some facilities) in a given area is considered. It may locate a new facility, or vary (up or down) the quality of its existing facilities, or close some of them, or a combination of all those possibilities, whatever it is the best to maximize its profit, … Read more
We consider mixed 0-1 integer programs of the form $\min\{cx+hy: Ax+By \geq b, x \in \{0,1\}^n,y \in \{0,1\}^p \times \R^{N-p}_+\}$ in which the subproblem arising when $x$ is fixed has special structure. One such example is the capacitated facility location problem with single-sourcing in which the linear programming relaxation of the subproblem is a transportation … Read more
Covering problems are well-studied in the domain of Operations Research, and, more specifically, in Location Science. When the location space is a network, the most frequent assumption is to consider the candidate facility locations, the points to be covered, or both, to be discrete sets. In this work, we study the set-covering location problem when … Read more
The rising significance of renewable energy increases the importance of representing time-varying input data in energy system optimization studies. Time-series aggregation, which reduces temporal model complexity, has emerged in recent years to address this challenge. We provide a comprehensive review of time-series aggregation for the optimization of energy systems. We show where time series affect … Read more
The pandemic caused by the corona virus SARS-CoV-2 raised many new challenges for humanity. For instance, governments imposed regulations such as lockdowns, resulting in supply chain shocks at different tiers. Additionally, delivery services reached their capacity limits because the demand for mail orders soared temporarily during the lockdowns. We argue that one option to support … Read more
Generation Capacity Expansion Planning (GCEP) requires high temporal resolution to account for the volatility of renewable energy supply. Because the GCEP optimization problem is often computationally intractable, time-series input data are often aggregated to representative periods using clustering. However, clustering removes extreme events, which are important to achieve reliable system designs. We present a method … Read more
It is well-established that increased product visibility to shoppers leads to higher sales for retailers. In this study, we propose an optimization methodology which assigns product categories and subcategories to store locations and sublocations to maximize the overall visibility of products to shoppers. The methodology is hierarchically developed to meet strategic and tactical layout planning … Read more
We study a competitive facility location problem (CFLP), where two firms sequentially open new facilities within their budgets, in order to maximize their market shares of demand that follows a probabilistic choice model. This process is a Stackelberg game and admits a bilevel mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP) formulation. We derive an equivalent, single-level MINLP reformulation … Read more
Decision making problems are typically concerned with maximizing efficiency. In contrast, we address problems where there are multiple stakeholders and a centralized decision maker who is obliged to decide in a fair manner. Different decisions give different utility to each stakeholder. In cases where these decisions are made repeatedly, we provide efficient mathematical programming formulations … Read more
The NP-hard Multi-Row Facility Layout Problem (MRFLP) consists of a set of one-dimensional departments and pairwise transport weights between them. It asks for a non-overlapping arrangement of the departments along a given number of rows such that the weighted sum of the horizontal center-to-center distances between the departments is minimized. We mainly focus on the … Read more
