Facility Location with item storage and delivery Seminar

Event details

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) is the UK’s largest lifeboat charity, and has been saving lives around the coast of the UK for almost 200 years; this work is part of an ongoing research activity aimed at improving their warehousing and logistics operations. We consider a facility location problem to determine the optimal number and location of warehouses, as well as which items should be stored in each location, with the objective of minimising storage and transportation costs, both from supplier to warehouse and warehouse to end user. We propose a mixed-integer non-linear programming formulation of the problem, which we then linearise in two different ways: the computational performance of these methods is compared, and the problem is solved to optimality using CPLEX, with potential savings identified in the case of the RNLI.