Facility location integrated with vehicle routing based on demand

This project aims at investigating different assumptions about the representation of the demand in the context of facility location and routing problem.

Depot location and vehicle routing are crucial aspects of logistic networks. Most of the time, these two levels of decision are addressed separately which leads to obtaining a suboptimal solution.

The location-routing problem (LRP) integrates these two kinds of decisions. Given a set of potential depots with opening costs, a fleet of identical vehicles and a set of customers with known demands, the classical LRP consists in opening a subset of depots, assigning customers to them and determining vehicle routes, to minimize a total cost including the cost of open depots, the fixed costs of vehicles used, and the total cost of the routes.

In most cases, demand is considered as given, therefore, supply is built upon a priori known demand. In real life cases, demand has a probabilistic nature and demand is often not taken into account in LRP problems from a probabilistic point of view. This is the main focus of this project. The researchers will investigate different assumptions about the representation of the demand in this context.

This six-month project will be carried out by the Transport and Mobility Laboratory (TRANSP-OR) of professor Michel Bierlaire. It is sponsored by Electricité de France (EDF).

Principal investigator Prof Michel Bierlaire
Project manager Shadi Sharif Azadeh
Sponsor Electricité de France (EDF)
Period 2015
Laboratory TRANSP-OR
Collaboration TRACE