Multiobjective Optimization Models for Locating Vehicle Inspection Stations Subject to Stochastic Demand, Varying Velocity and Regional Constraints

Abstract

Deciding an optimal location of a transportation facility and automotive service enterprise is an interesting and important issue in the area of facility location allocation (FLA). In practice, some factors, i.e., customer demands, allocations, and locations of customers and facilities, are changing, and thus, it features with uncertainty. To account for this uncertainty, some researchers have addressed the stochastic time and cost issues of FLA. A new FLA research issue arises when decision makers want to minimize the transportation time of customers and their transportation cost while ensuring customers to arrive at their desired destination within some specific time and cost. By taking the vehicle inspection station as a typical automotive service enterprise example, this paper presents a novel stochastic multiobjective optimization to address it. This work builds two practical stochastic multiobjective programs subject to stochastic demand, varying velocity, and regional constraints. A hybrid intelligent algorithm integrating stochastic simulation and multiobjective teaching-learning-based optimization algorithm is proposed to solve the proposed programs. This approach is applied to a real-world location problem of a vehicle inspection station in Fushun, China. The results show that this is able to produce satisfactory Pareto solutions for an actual vehicle inspection station location problem.