Production planning in industrial townships modeled as hub location-allocation problems considering congestion in manufacturing plants

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we aim to develop optimal production plans in industrial townships modeled as hub location–allocation problems (HLAP) taking congestion into account. In the proposed model, hub nodes are considered as industrial townships where manufacturing plants and a central distribution warehouse are located, and two objectives are targeted. The first is to minimize the total costs, which includes the cost of hub deployment, factories and warehouses, transportation, and so forth. The second is to minimize the total elapsed time of products in manufacturing plants and warehouses modeled as queues. Due to the ambiguity in estimating the model’s parameters, they are considered as fuzzy parameters to make model closer to reality. The fuzzy model is then converted into an equivalent crisp model by combining the expected value (EV) and the fuzzy chance constrained programming (FCCP) approaches. Subsequently, the bi-objective crisp model is converted into a single aggregated objective model. In order to validate the proposed model, six numerical examples are solved, and the sensitivity of the proposed model with regard to changes in model’s parameters is investigated.