Design of facility location-allocation network with an emergency backup supply system

Abstract

This paper considers an emergency backup supply (EBS) system from the secondary supplying facility (SSF) when the primal supplying facility (PSF) cannot satisfy the demand in case of disruptions. In this context, EBS requires each demand point to be covered by a PSF and an SSF. Using a multi-objective programming model, we propose a procedure of finding the option that would generate the most efficient EBS system and investigate the effect of backup supply from the SSFs on the facility location-allocation (FLA) design problem. We demonstrate the applicability of our proposed efficiency-driven approach and compare two cases, without and with the EBS system. From the numerical results, we observe that the FLA schemes with the EBS system perform well regarding increasing ENDS and yielding higher productivity. The proposed efficiency-driven FLA model with the EBS system would help decision-makers design and select efficient FLA schemes. [Received 29 June 2019; Revised 9 December 2019; Accepted 1 February 2020]