Study on the Location Routing Problem of the Multi-Stage Logistics Network

Abstract

Logistics costs often represent a large portion of the expenses of companies. In order to reduce them, location allocation and vehicle routing are crucial. In the administrative decision of the logistics, location allocation problems (LAP) and vehicle routing problems (VRP) are interdependent. But most of time, they are considered separately. This can not reduce company's total cost in reality and will also increase the total cost sometimes. Thus, we should integrate these two problems. The location routing problem (LRP) overcomes above drawback by simultaneously tackling location allocation and vehicle routing problem. Nowadays, there are many literatures to research LRP, but most only research a single-stage logistics location routing problem. In this paper, we consider the multi-stage logistics location routing problem. We present mathematical model for multi-stage logistics location routing problem and proposes a heuristic approach on the basis of genetic algorithm to solve problem.