A Cost Operator Approach to Multistage Location-Allocation.

The multistage factory-warehouse location-allocation problem is to decide on locations of warehouses and shipping amounts from the factories through the warehouses to meet customer demands in such a way that the total fixed plus variable costs are minimized. Capacity constraints at factories and warehouses are also imposed. We present a cost operator algorithm for solving this problem. The algorithm takes into account the network structure and the submodularity of the objective function. Computational results with problems taken from the literature as well as new problems are provided. (Author)