Abstract
Dynamic facility location problems consider situations where it is important to decide not only where but also when to open (or close) facilities, given a planning time horizon. Considering explicitly multiple time periods is especially important if assignment costs are expected to change significantly in the future and relocating facilities is expensive. The majority of models presented in the literature considers binary decision variables that define whether facilities are open in a given time period. In addition, if a facility is first opened at some time period then clients can usually be assigned to it from that period forward, without any guarantee that the facility will be operational at the planned time period. In this paper, a new mathematical model is presented where uncertainty in the setup time of facilities is explicitly considered. This means that the decision maker is only capable of deciding where to locate facilities and when to begin all the necessary works to get the facilities operational, but the time elapsed until opening the facility is not known for sure. A primal-dual heuristic is also developed for this problem and its performance is compared with the performance of a commercial exact solver.
Published Version
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