Multiperiod Location-Routing with Decoupled Time Scales

This paper focuses on a multiperiod discrete facility location problem where transportation costs are considered together with location costs to design the operating facility pattern along a time horizon. The problem captures the difference in the scope of the location and routing decisions by considering different scales within the time horizon. Thus, solutions to this problem reflect the stability of locational decisions along time. The high complexity of this problem makes it impossible to be solved in practice with commercial software. For this reason, an approximation based on replacing vehicle routes by spanning trees is proposed, and its capability for providing good quality solutions is assessed in a series of computational experiments. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.