Reliable facility location design under the risk of disruptions

摘要

The uncapacitated fixed charge location problem (UFL) selects facility locations in order to balance the trade-off between initial setup costs and day-to-day transportation costs. Some of the constructed facilities may become unavailable due to disruptions caused by natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or labor strikes. When a facility failure occurs, customers may have to be reassigned from their original facilities to others that require higher transportation costs. This paper presents facility location models that minimize normal construction and transportation costs as well as alternate arrangements against facility failures within the system. No company would accept a supply network with high normal operating costs to take care of very rare facility disruptions, n order to balance the tradeoff between normal operating costs and failure costs, the network structure should depend on how likely the candidate sites may get disrupted, as well as their closeness to the potential customers. The proposed design supply networks are both reliable and cost efficient. The expected transportation costs are minimized in both the regular and the failure scenarios to balance the trade-off between normal and emergency operating costs. The failure of each facility site is assumed to be independent, and the probability is taken as a prior. Two distinct models are presented in this article to handle the reliable facility location problem; one discrete and the other continuous.