2020/05/28 by Peter Hillmann, Tobias Uhlig, Hillmann, Peter +5
Computer Science · Mathematics · #Computational Complexity (cs.CC) #Distributed #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Theory (cs.IT) #Parallel #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC) #cs.CC #cs.DC #cs.IT #math.IT
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2006.01598
International Conference on Service Operations and Logistics, and Informatics 2015. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2005.13905
arxiv created 2020/05/28 · arxiv updated 2020/06/03
The facility location problem is a well-known challenge in logistics that is proven to be NP-hard. In this paper we specifically simulate the geographical placement of facilities to provide adequate service to customers. Determining reasonable center locations is an important challenge for a management since it directly effects future service costs. Generally, the objective is to place the central nodes such that all customers have convenient access to them. We analyze the problem and compare different placement strategies and evaluate the number of required centers. We use several existing approaches and propose a new heuristic for the problem. For our experiments we consider various scenarios and employ simulation to evaluate the performance of the optimization algorithms. Our new optimization approach shows a significant improvement. The presented results are generally applicable to many domains, e.g., the placement of military bases, the planning of content delivery networks, or the placement of warehouses.