Optimal location of overwork-allowed facilities subject to choice of various equipment modes

This paper considers a facility location problem, which is concerned with locating facilities on a supply chain network and installing the associated equipments at the facilities to meet a given set of demands. The objective function is to minimize the sum of setup cost (facility opening cost and equipment installation cost), operation cost, and distribution cost. For the equipments, various choices of equipment modes need to be determined. Moreover, in the problem, overwork is allowed each facility but at expensive operation cost. The proposed problem is characterized as being NP-hard problem, so that a heuristic algorithm is derived. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, computational experiments with various numerical instances are conducted.