Solving a Dynamic Facility Location Problem with an Application in Forestry

We consider a recently introduced multi-period facility location problem with multiple commodities and multiple capacity levels, motivated by an application in the forestry sector. The problem allows for the relocation of facilities, as well as for the temporary closing of parts of the facilities, while other parts remain open. In addition, it uses particular capacity constraints that involve integer rounding of the allocated demands. In this paper, we propose a strong formulation for the problem, as well as a hybrid heuristic that first applies Lagrangian relaxation and then constructs a restricted mixed-integer programming model based on the previously obtained Lagrangian solutions. Computational results for large-scale instances emphasize the usefulness of the heuristic in practice. While general-purpose mixed-integer programming solvers do not find feasible solutions for about half of the instances, the heuristic consistently provides high-quality solutions in short computing times, as well as tight bounds on their optimality.