A Reliability Model for Facility Location Design Under Imperfect Information

This paper aims to propose a modeling framework for reliable facility location design under imperfect information, i.e., when customers do not know the real-time information of facility disruption states. The authors consider a realistic “try-and-error” strategy for a customer to visit facilities without knowing their states till arriving at this facility; i.e., a customer keeps trying a number of assigned facilities ranked sequentially by their transportation costs until she acquires the service or is forced to give up trying. The research problem is to determine the best facility location that minimizes the total system cost, including initial facility investment and expected long-term operational cost from transportation and loss of service, when facilities are subject to probabilistic disruptions and customers use the try-and-error strategy. This problem is formulated into a compact integer program (IP) that can be efficiently solved by state-of-the-art solvers. A set of case studies are conducted to illustrate the applicability of the proposed model and its sensitivity to parameter changes. The results reveal a number of interesting insights into system design, including the significance of multi-level customer-facility assignments and the existence of a robust system design against variation of loss-of-service penalty.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB30(7) Paper Review Group #3. Alternate title: Reliability Model for Facility Location Design Under Imperfect Information
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Yun, Lifen
  • Ji, Changxu
  • Li, Xiaopeng
  • Fan, Hongqiang
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 18p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Case studies; Customer service; Facilities; Integer programming; Location; Reliability; System design
• Subject Areas: Design; Planning and Forecasting; Terminals and Facilities; I20: Design and Planning of Transport Infrastructure;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01515530
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-4267
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 24 2014 8:43AM