The City Logistics Facility Location Problem (original) (raw)

The Facility Location Problem for an Alternative Delivery Service

2018

The main intention of the bachelor thesis is to introduce all necessary theory to understand and apply the facility location problem for an alternative delivery service. Solving the facility location problem we are able to find optimal warehouse locations to minimize transportation costs from a firm to customers. Our attention is focused on an alternative delivery service which is slowly becoming to be taken seriously in logistic disciplines because many companies are trying to apply drones or robots for shipping goods. The first part of this thesis deals with an important theoretical background needed to understand the facility location problem. Microeconomic view of the problem is presented, basic knowledge of mathematical programming with algorithms is explained and the facility location problem itself is defined. Moreover, each step of the branch & bound algorithm for the facility location problem is explained on an example from Prague. In the practical part of the thesis, we solve a real problem for the Czech company which would like to implement a drone delivery service in Prague. Finally, we discuss future technical progress and its impacts on autonomous delivery service, legislative and privacy problems with a drone delivery system in Prague and other possible usage of autonomous vehicles in the Czech Republic.

Location of Distribution Facilities in an Urban System

2020

Facility location has an important role for any business, but especially for companies whose profits depends on efficient logistic operations. In this paper, we present a discrete uncapacitated facility location problem, where preferable locations for one or more distribution facilities are determined. We also make some general comments regarding probable and expected locations and the properties related to the stability of those, when number of facilities to be located increase. We apply the model on data from Sweden, and to some extent from Finland, in order to identify optimal locations for facilities in the urban system. We also perform a sensitivity analysis in order to find thresholds where cities become stable spots for a facility to locate in, independent on the number of facilities located in the urban system. Hence, a municipality leader who want to increase the attractiveness of the municipality as a site for new facilities may also find this study interesting. Finally, a...

Planning Models and Methods for City Logistics

2017

Southampton, UK, Oct 18-20, 2017 Benders Decomposition for the Multi-Period Sales Districting Problem Saranthorn Phusingha, Joerg Kalcsics School of Mathematics, The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom In the sales districting problem, we are given a set of customers and a set of sales representatives in some area. The customers are given as points distributed across the area and the sales representatives have to provide a service at the customers’ locations to satisfy their requirements. The task is to allocate each customer to one sales representative. This partitions the set of customers into subsets, called districts. Each district is expected to have approximately equal workload and travelling time for each sales representative to promote fairness among them and the overall travelling distance should be minimal for economic reasons. However, the real travelling distance is often hard to calculate due to many complicating factors i.e. time windows or unexpected situations li...

Goodtrip: A New Approach for Modelling and Evaluating Urban Goods Distribution

1999

The GoodTrip model estimates goods flows, urban freight traffic and its impacts. This paper discusses the theory and application of the model, that is based on logistical chains. Liveability and accessibility of urban areas are influenced by freight traffic resulting from logistical choices in the supply chain, like warehouse location, delivery frequencies, vehicle type and routing. To support decision making it is necessary to model these choices and their effects, in current and future situations. GoodTrip is a tool for evaluating different concepts of freight distribution from both a societal and an economical viewpoint. The modelling approach is innovative and the first results are promising. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD E202211.