Location-routing problem with time windows: Novel mathematical programming formulations

The location-routing problem (LRP) is a relatively new research direction within location analysis that takes into account vehicle routing aspects. The goal of LRP is to solve a facility location problem and a vehicle routing problem simultaneously. In this work, we consider the problem of location-routing problem with time windows (LRPTW), in which every customer has to be serviced within a pre-specified time interval. We propose two novel mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulations for the location-routing problem with hard and soft time windows respectively. To show the validity of the presented formulations, we solve some typical problems of relatively small size to optimality using an standard optimization package

Keywords:

location-routing , mathematical programming , time window , logistics