An Integrated Queuing Model for Site Selection and Inventory Storage Planning of a Distribution Center with Customer Loss Consideration

The distribution center location problem is a crucial question for logistics decision makers. The optimization of these decisions needs careful attention to the fixed facility costs, inventory costs, transportation costs and customer responsiveness. In this paper we study the location selection of a distribution center which satisfies demands with a M/M/1 finite queueing system plus balking and reneging. The distribution center uses one for one inventory policy, where each arrival demand orders a unit of product to the distribution center and the distribution center refers this demand to its supplier. The matrix geometric method is applied to model the queueing system in order to obtain the steady-state probabilities and evaluate some performance measures. A cost model is developed to determine the best location for the distribution center and its optimal storage capacity and a numerical example is presented to determine the computability of the results derived in this study.

Keywords:

Discrete facility location , Distribution center , Logistics , Inventory policy , Queueing theory , Markov processes