Locating a commercial marine port under uncertainties with simulation and meta-heuristic approaches.

摘要

This research developed a solution of the placement of a new port in a system of other existing ports: A set of customers, having uncertain demands, will be served by the existing and new ports, each with limited capacity. The cost of transportation from customers to ports is uncertain as well. The objective is to locate the new port under different objectives such as minimizing the total transportation cost of customers, maximizing the number served at the new port, or minimizing the maximum transportation cost by a customer to a port.; In a deterministic setting, it assumes that precise values are available for the underlying parameters. In reality, this is usually not the case. Given a location scenario, realistic computation of the performance measures requires explicit consideration of the robust and stochastic elements in the system. Part of the modeling process is to choose an appropriate performance measurement.; Previous work in the literature has focused on model formulations and solution approaches to capture the uncertainty. However, few meta-heuristics have been applied to the uncertainty, though they have been applied successfully to deterministic facility location problems. The significance of this work highlights the proposed solution strategy for this facility location model under uncertainties. A simulation-based system is built and integrated with the meta-heuristic methodology. According to the literature to date, no known meta-heuristic approach has ever been proposed for this problem in the field of location theory.