Facility Location with Item Storage and Delivery

We discuss part of an ongoing research activity involving the University of Southampton and the Royal British National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), aimed at improving the RNLI’s warehousing and logistics operations. In particular, we consider a facility location problem to determine the optimal number and location of warehouses and which items are to be stored in each of them, minimising the costs of storage and transportation. We propose a mixed-integer non-linear programming formulation for the problem, which we then linearise in two different ways and solve to optimality with CPLEX. Computational results are reported and illustrated. © 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.