The Value of Flexibility in Robust Location-Transportation Problems

This article studies a multi-period capacitated fixed-charge location-transportation problem in which, while the location and capacity of each facility need to be determined immediately, the determination of final production and distribution of products can be delayed until actual orders are received in each period. In contexts where little is known about future demand, robust optimization, … Read more

A several new mixed integer linear programming formulations for exploration of online social networks

The goal of this paper is to identify the most promising sets of closest assignment constraints from the literature, in order to improve mixed integer linear programming formulations for exploration of information flow within a social network. The direct comparison between proposed formulations is performed on standard single source capacitated facility location problem instances. Therefore, … Read more

Public Facility Location Using Dispersion, Population, and Equity Criteria

Administrators/Decision Makers (DMs) responsible for making locational decisions for public facilities have many other overriding factors to consider that dominate traditional OR/MS objectives that relate to response time. We propose that an appropriate role for the OR/MS analyst is to help the DMs identify a good set of solutions rather than an optimal solution that … Read more

Scenario Trees – A Process Distance Approach

The approximation of stochastic processes by trees is an important topic in multistage stochastic programming. In this paper we focus on improving the approximation of large trees by smaller (tractable) trees. The quality of the approximation is measured by the nested distance, recently introduced in [Pflug]. The nested distance is derived from the Wasserstein distance. … Read more

An aggressive reduction scheme for the simple plant location problem

Pisinger et al. introduced the concept of `aggressive reduction’ for large-scale combinatorial optimisation problems. The idea is to spend much time and effort in reducing the size of the instance, in the hope that the reduced instance will then be small enough to be solved by an exact algorithm. We present an aggressive reduction scheme … Read more

Exact and heuristic approaches to the budget-constrained dynamic uncapacitated facility location-network design problem

Facility location-network design problems seek to simultaneously determine the locations of fa- cilities and the design of the network connecting the facilities so as to best serve a set of clients accessing the facilities via the network. Here we study a dynamic (multi-period) version of the problem, subject to a budget constraint limiting the investment … Read more

Locating a competitive facility in the plane with a robustness criterion

A new continuous location model is presented and embedded in the literature on robustness in facility location. The multimodality of the model is investigated, and a branch and bound method based on dc optimization is described. Numerical experience is reported, showing that the developed method allows one to solve in a few seconds problems with … Read more

Locating Restricted Facilities on Binary Maps

In this paper we consider several facility location problems with applications to cost and social welfare optimization, when the area map is encoded as a binary (0,1) mxn matrix. We present algorithmic solutions for all the problems. Some cases are too particular to be used in practical situations, but they are at least a starting … Read more

On the integrality of the uncapacitated facility location polytope

We study a system of linear inequalities associated with the uncapacitated facility location problem. We show that this system defines a polytope with integer extreme points if and only if the graph does not contain a certain type of odd cycles. We also derive odd cycle inequalities and give a separation algorithm. Article Download View … Read more

MINLP Strengthening for Separable Convex Quadratic Transportation-Cost UFL

In the context of a variation of the standard UFL (Uncapacitated Facility Location) problem, but with an objective function that is a separable convex quadratic function of the transportation costs, we present some techniques for improving relaxations of MINLP formulations. We use a disaggregation principle and a strategy of developing model-specific valid inequalities (some nonlinear), … Read more