Warehouse Location Problem

Introduction

The Warehouse Location Problem concerns finding the best location in which to place warehouses to supply existing stores. This problem accounts for the cost of building each warehouse, as well as the cost of lorries travelling between warehouses and stores.

For a more precise definition of the problem, see here.

Transhipment Hub Problem

Introduction

The Transhipment Hub Problem concerns the costs and goods distribution requirements around a network of warehouses, transhipment hubs and stores.

Goods originate from a warehouse and must be processed in a transhipment hub before being transported to a store. Thus, vehicles must collect goods from a warehouse, drive them to a transhipment hub (where the goods may, for example, undergo some processing), and then drive the goods to a variety of stores.

Each warehouse has a specified stock level (number of items it holds) and each store has a certain demand (number of items it requires). The solver must calculate how to split up the distribution such that these constraints are respected.

Note that the Transhipment Hub Problem typically takes significantly longer to solve than the Warehouse Location Problem.

Of course, “warehouses”, “transhipment hubs” and “stores” could be seen as other entities, such as factories, final assembly points and customers.

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A dataset containing the locations of UK supermarkets is used for problem auto-generation.

Supermarkets in this dataset are divided into four categories:

• Band A (Small store): Less than 280 m²
• Band B (Mid-sized store): 280 - 1400 m²
• Band C (Large supermarket): 1400 - 2800 m²
• Band D (Hypermarket): Over 2800 m²

For the purposes of dataset generation, the supermarkets are used as follows:

• For the Warehouse Location Problem, size bands A and B and treated as stores, whilst size bands C and D are treated as warehouses.
• For the Transhipment Hub Problem, size bands A and B are treated as stores, size band C is treated as transhipment hubs and size band D is treated as warehouses.

The problem type is currently set to .