A service logistics model for simultaneous siting of facilities and multiple levels of equipment

Service logistics aims at the most efficient utilization of facilities, minimizing the cost of excess capacity, while making the service more responsive to customer demands. Location of facilities and allocation of equipment to facilities is an important decision making area in service logistics. Earlier models developed to address this issue either consider all demands to be covered or all demands cannot be covered because of equipment unavailability. Most of the models developed in the literature only consider single type of equipment usage. The authors develop a model for the multiple facility, multiple levels of equipment problem called the Multiple Equipment Multiple Cover facility Location-Allocation problem (MEMCOLA) which considers maximal coverage of demand, including multiple coverage of demand by equipment of a specific type, given that each equipment has a certain probability of being unavailable. MEMCOLA simultaneously locates a given number of facilities and allocates different types of equipment to the facilities.