Abstract
This paper considers a multi-plant and multi-distribution centers (DCs) supply chain distribution network (SCDN). The decisions are to locate the open DCs, allocate customers to DCs, and DCs to plants to minimize the total logistics cost including the fixed costs and warehousing cost of DCs, and shipping cost from plants to DCs and from DCs to customers. Also, it takes workload balance requirements into consideration to avoid those open DCs being congested or idle. A bi-level programming model is proposed to deal with this problem. The upper level considers DC location problem and production-allocation problem. The lower level focuses on allocating customers to DCs such that the workload of each open DC is balanced. We propose a double threshold accepting (TA) approach to solve this problem. Four different examples are tested and the results show that our double threshold accepting algorithm can obtain a good solution efficiently.
