- Title
- Hierarchical location-routing problems
- Creator
- Esmaeilbeigi, Rasul
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Hierarchical facility location problems arise when different levels of facilities need to be established. This thesis studies two extensions of this class of optimization problems in the context of a whey recovery network design problem. Whey is a by-product of cheese production that should be processed due to environmental and/or competitive advantages. The thesis contains two parts. In Part I, we study a whey recovery network design problem under demand uncertainty, where demand is the amount of raw whey produced by a set of cheese makers. We formulate the problem as a hierarchical facility location problem with two levels of facilities and use a two-stage stochastic programming approach to address the uncertainty. We develop an accelerated Benders decomposition method to solve the problem to optimality. An extensive computational study demonstrates the efficacy of our improved algorithms. We also report useful managerial insights for a real case study with 51 cheese makers. In Part II, we combine facility location and vehicle routing decisions in order to design a more realistic whey recovery network. This yields a new routing problem that can potentially reduce the routing costs. The problem is formulated as a vehicle-index model in which a tight upper bound on the fleet size is employed. We also develop tight upper bounds on the fleet size for a wide variety of routing problems. Extensive computational experiments indicate that instances of the problem with as many as 10 cheese makers can be solved very efficiently by using an improved branch-and-cut method based on the time-index formulation.
- Subject
- Benders decomposition method; whey recovery; cheese production; stochastic programming
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1426568
- Identifier
- uon:38439
- Rights
- Copyright 2020 Rasul Esmaeilbeigi
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 38 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 1 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |