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

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