Integrated Location-Routing Problem Modeling and GA Algorithm Solving

For logistics providers, One of the most important strategic decisions to be taken in the design of logistic systems concerns the location of facilities (location problem). The other important strategic decision is the structure and management of the fleets (vehicle routing problem). Most often, even if the two kinds of problems, namely location of facilities and vehicle routing, appear together in a given scenario, they are studied and solved separately. However, it is well-known that studying vehicle routing only when locations have already been fixed, leads, in general, to suboptimal solutions. This paper combined the two problems together which were called integrated location-routing problems (ILRP), and provided an integrated location-routing model. Then, A Genetic Algorithm (GA) was developed to find the integrated solution with the minimal location and delivery cost. At last, a numerical example was available.