Fuzzy transfer point location problem: a possibilistic unconstrained nonlinear programming approach

Abstract

Recently, the transfer point location problem with weighted demand points and uniformly distributed coordinates has been introduced. In the real world problems, such as disaster situations, different points of an area might be demand point locations with different possibility degrees. So, it is necessary to develop more applicable models for these kinds of problems. In this paper, a new transfer point location problem with weighted demand points and fuzzy coordinates is developed. The proposed model is formulated as a fuzzy unconstrained nonlinear programming in which decision variables are obtained as fuzzy numbers. Due to the complexity of the developed model, a new fuzzy logic controller is designed based on the derived fuzzy decision variables to infer the optimum or near-optimum values for decision variables. Finally, a numerical example is presented and its results are compared with the optimum solutions of the problem in order to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed model.