An efficient greedy heuristic for warehouse-retailer network design optimization

In this paper, we study a warehouse-retailer network design (WRND) model that simultaneously makes the location, distribution, and warehouse-retailer echelon inventory replenishment decisions. Although a column generation algorithm was proposed recently in the literature, it remains a challenge to solve large size instances of this NP-hard problem efficiently and effectively. The purpose of this paper is to present a greedy algorithm. Computational results demonstrate that our greedy algorithm can solve large-scale WRND problems efficiently with errors within 3%–4% on average.