γ-Robust facility relocation problem

In this paper, we consider relocating facilities, where we have demand changes in the network. Relocations are performed by closing some of the existing facilities from low demand areas and opening new ones in newly emerging areas. However, the actual changes of demand are not known in advance. Therefore, different scenarios with known probabilities are used to capture such demand changes. We develop a mixed integer programming model for facility relocation that minimizes the expected weighted distance while making sure that relative regret for each scenario is no greater than γ. We analyzed the problem structure and developed a Lagrangian Decomposition algorithm (LDA) to expedite the solution process. Numerical experiments are carried out to show the performance of LDA against the exact solution method.