Distribution network design in battlefield environment with loss consideration

Ji Ren, Yue-Jin Tan, Xiao-Lei

Abstract

We study the distribution network design problem in a battlefield environment. The problem is to decide where to locate the distribution nodes and which distribution nodes or supply nodes the combat units are allocated to minimize the total setup cost and transportation cost. Some commodities would be destroyed by the enemy during the distribution process, and the loss quantity is assumed to follow a function of the exposure time in the distribution process. An Integer Programming model is proposed to formulate the problem, which is solved by Lagrangian heuristic algorithm. One hundred numerical examples including up to 20 supply nodes, 80 distribution nodes and 400 combat nodes are randomly generated based on data investigated from military wars and games, and all of them are used to test the solution approach. Computational results show that the algorithm can present very good near-optimal solution within short computational time.