Study of Facility Location-network Design Problem in Presence of Facility Disruptions: a Case Study

Considering to the reliability in modeling of facility location problems is one of the most effective ways to hedge against failures of system from time to time. In reality, the combined facility location network design problem with respect to the reliability of system has several applications in industries and services such as locating health care service centers, locating gas compressor stations, and designing water tubing networks. In this paper, a mixed integer non-linear programming formulation is developed to model the combined facility location network design problem with unreliable facilities. The new mathematical formulation considers different costs including facility location, link construction/improvement, and transportation costs. It particularly takes the maximum allowable failure cost of the system into account. Then, the proposed model is linearized by suitable techniques and solved to efficiently obtain the solutions. Besides, a practical case study is presented in detail to illustrate the application of the proposed mathematical model. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is done to provide an insight into the behavior of the proposed model in response to changes of key parameters of the problem. The results demonstrate the capability of the model.