Facility location planning with realistic operation times in supply chain

Facility location planning (FLP) problem is the strategic level planning in supply chain. The FLP is significantly affected by the operation time of each facility. In most of the FLP researches, operation time of facility has been treated as a fixed value. However, the operation time is not a static factor in real situations and the fixed operation time may lead to unrealistic FLP. In this paper, a mixed integer programming (MIP) model is proposed for solving the 3-stage FLP problem and operation times are adjusted by the results from the simulation model and an iterative approach combining the analytic model and simulation model is proposed to obtain more realistic operation plans for FLP problems.