Fuzzy Goal Programming Approach to Multi-objective Facility Location Problem for Emergency Goods and Services Distribution

Abstract

Ensuring the distribution of vital goods and services during emergency or post-disaster situations is crucial for meeting the needs of those affected as quickly as possible. The challenge lies in finding suitable and pertinent locations for facilities to efficiently distribute these goods and services. In such a situation location decisions for these facilities must be made considering multiple objectives. However in such a real-life problem the aspiration levels of each of the objectives are not certainly known due to unpredictable results of a disaster. Consequently the problem is formulated as fuzzy multi-objective facility location problem where two objectives are taken into consideration. We specifically consider minimization of total cost of facilities to be opened and minimization of total distance travelled by victims. Due to the conflicting nature of these objective functions we propose to employ two different fuzzy weighted goal programming techniques to find suitable compromise solutions for the problem. We present our developed models and provide results for three instances with different sizes. The proposed models are coded using IBM CPLEX Optimizer to obtain solutions in a reasonable amount of computational time. This paper contributes to the literature by providing two different fuzzy weighted goal programming techniques and comparing their efficiencies. © 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.