Integrated design of supply chain networks with three echelons, multiple commodities and technology selection

We consider a strategic supply chain design problem with three echelons, multiple commodities and technology selection. We model the problem as a tri-echelon, capacitated facility location problem that decides on the location of plants and warehouses, their capacity and technology planning, the assignment of commodities to plants and the flow of commodities to warehouses and customer zones. We use a mixed-integer programming formulation strengthened by valid but redundant constraints and apply Lagrangean relaxation to decompose the problem by echelon. Lagrangean relaxation provides a lower bound that is calculated using an interior-point cutting plane method. Feasible solutions are generated using a primal heuristic that uses the solution of the subproblems. Unlike common practice in the literature, the decomposition does not aim at getting easy subproblems, but rather at getting subproblems that preserve most of the characteristics of the original problem. Not only does this provide a sharp lower bound but also leads to a simple and efficient primal heuristic. We can afford to have relatively difficult subproblems because the interior-point cutting plane method used to solve the Lagrangean dual makes clever and selective choices of the Lagrangean multipliers leading to fewer calls to the subproblems. Computational results indicate the efficiency of the approach in providing a sharp bound and in generating feasible solutions that are of high quality.