A location-driven approach for warehouse location problem

After a large-scale disaster occurred, medical service centers are needed to provide appropriate medical treatments for injured patients. To support those medical service centers, a warehouse should be set up to stock medical supplies that can be distributed to medical service centers in different quantities in multiple periods. However, the delivery of medical supplies depends on practical environmental conditions. In practice, the cost including the travel time and monetary cost from the warehouse to the medical service center presents a complex relationship. The existing methods do not consider this complex relationship. To overcome the pitiful of the existing methods, we propose a location-driven method. To implement the proposed location-driven method, three numerical algorithms are considered. Among them, the fixed-point-based heuristic algorithm is compared with the existing two algorithms to illustrate its superiority. Also, the bootstrap resampling technique is applied to obtain a reasonable region for improving the flexibility of locating the warehouse. To illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method, several simulation studies are considered. The computational results show the advantages of the proposed method in determining the warehouse location and identifying the reasonable region for locating the warehouse.