CAEE Seminar: Toward Reliable Design of Service Facility Location: Addressing the Threat of Probabilistic Service Disruptions

The Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering Department will host a seminar featuring Yanfeng Ouyang from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The seminar topic will be Toward Reliable Design of Service Facility Location: Addressing the Threat of Probabilistic Service Disruptions.

Abstract

While planning service networks to serve spatially distributed customers, we consider the case where facilities are subject to probabilistic failure (due to adverse weather or disasters). If a facility fails, its customers either lose service and incur a high penalty, or have to seek farther facilities and bear excessive service costs. We mainly focus on planning optimal facility locations and customer assignment strategies for a supply chain, to minimize the expected system costs under normal and failure scenarios. We will present a continuum approximation model that serves as a very efficient heuristic method to find near-optimum solutions for large-scale systems and helps provide useful managerial insights (e.g., solution robustness to input data errors, and effects of system heterogeneity). We also briefly show how to develop compact mixed-integer program models that can be solved by customized algorithms such as Lagrangian relaxation. Our models have been extended to allow (i) inbound and outbound deliveries to be conducted via vehicle routing, and (ii) facility disruptions to exhibit spatial correlations, e.g., when interdependent facilities are exposed to similar hazards or the risks of cascading failures.