2009 International Conference on New Trends in Information and Service Science

Two-Phase Particle Swarm Optimization for Multi-depot Location-Routing Problem

PENG Yang School of Computer & Information Engineering Zhejiang Gongshang University Hangzhou, P R China pengyang@mail.zjgsu.edu.cn
AbstractThe location-routing problem is one of the problems in distribution network designing and logistic management, whose mathematical model is proposed in this paper firstly. Since finding the optimal solution for this model is an NP(non-polynomial)problem, we divide the original problem into two sub-problems, i.e., one is the locationallocation problem and the other is general vehicle routing problem. Each sub-problem is then solved in a sequential and iterative manner by the particle swarm optimization method embedded in the general framework for the problem-solving procedure. From an illustrational example, the availability and performance of proposed PSO can be approved. Keywords- Particle swarm optimization; LocationRouting problem; logistics; Vehicle-routing Introduction

CHEN Zi-Xia School of Computer & Information Engineering Zhejiang Gongshang University Hangzhou, P R China james20042005@163.com independently, and Min H,J.[7] synthesizes the past research and suggests some future research directions for the LRP. This paper divides the original LRP into two level problems, i.e., one is the location-allocation problem and the other is general vehicle routing problem. Each sub-problem is then solved in a sequential and iterative manner by the particle swarm optimization method embedded in the general framework for the problem-solving procedure. Particle swarm optimization(PSO) method is developed by Kennedy and Eberhart [10], PSO is an evolutionary algorithm that simulates the social behavior of bird flocking to a desired place, which follows a collaborative populationbased search model, each individual of the population, called a particle, flies around in a multidimensional search space looking for the optimal solution. Particle, then, may adjust their position according to their own and their neighboring-particles experience, PSO starts with initial solutions and updates them from iteration to iteration. PSO has many advantages over other heuristic techniques such that it can be implemented in a few lines of computer code, it requires only primitive mathematical operators, and it has great capability of escaping local optima. From our survey, ours is the first attempt in proposing a PSO algorithm for the Location-Routing problem. I. DESCRIPTION OF LRP AND ITS MATHMATICAL MODEL

The conceptual foundation of LRP studies date back to more than thirty years ago, although those earlier studies are far from capturing the total complexity of LRP, they already recognized the close relation between location and transportation decisions. In practical situation, the location of facilities not only affects locational costs, but also has a major impact on routing costs(Webb[2], Salhi and Rand [3]), the overall problem is, in fact, a multilevel LRP that should be taken jointly both location and routing problems into consideration. Location-Routing Problem(LRP) is one of the problems in integrated logistics optimization. Which is defined to find the optimal number and locations of the facilities, and simultaneously to get the vehicle schedules and distribution routes so as to minimize the total system cost (Tai-His Wu,C,J [1]). In the last years, however, several works have addressed LRP of various characteristics. Two sub-problems, LAP (location allocation problem ) and VRP (vehicle routing problem) of LRP have been recognized as NP-hard, thus LRP also belongs to the class of NP-hard problem. Since the exact algorithm seems infeasible to solve the problem, it is worthwhile to develop some heuristic methods. For instance, Nagy and Salhi[4,5] adopted the concept of nested methods for LRP; Tai-His Wu[1] proposes Simulation annealing method which decomposes the LRP into a LAP and a VRP; Maria A S, Juan A [8] also present a two-phase tabu search architecture for the solution of the LRP. Many researchers(Chen TW[6],S.c.Liu,S.B Lee[9], etc.)resort to iterative heuristic approaches, in which at each iteration a location problem plus a routing problem are solved

Location-Routing Problem can be stated as follows. A feasible set of potential facility sites and location and expected demands of each customer are given, which will meet its demands. The shipments of customer demand are carried out by vehicles, which are dispatched from the facilities and operated on routes that include multiple customers. There is a fixed cost that is associated with opening a facility at each potential site. A distribution cost associated with any routing of vehicles includes the cost of delivery operations. The cost of delivery operations is linear in the total distance the location of the facilities and the vehicle routes from the facilities to customers, the objective is to minimize the sum of the location an distribution costs so that the facilities capacities are not exceeded. The hypotheses are as follows: (1) The transportation is just in time. (2) The facility is both starting point and destination of circular vehicle routing; each facility serves more than two customers.
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978-0-7695-3687-3/09 $25.00 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/NISS.2009.223

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Nature of demand/supply is deterministic. There are multiple facilities. Size of vehicle fleets is a single vehicle. Vehicle capacities are determined. The total amount of goods is limited in every route by each vehicles capability. (7) facility capacities are undetermined; not all facilities have been chosen in every decision. (8) Each customer is served by one and only one vehicle. (9) Each facility is considered as a separate entity, not linked to the other facilities. (10) The objective is to minimize total cost. The sets, parameters and variables used in the mathematical model are defined as follows: G={i|i=1,,M}: the set of M feasible sites of candidate facility; H={j|j=1,N}: the set of N customers to be served; S = {G} {H } :the set of all feasible sites and customers, it is also referred to all nodes; V={k|k=1,,K}: the set of K vehicles available for routing from the facilities; Cij: distance between node i to node j, i S , j S Gi: fixed costs of establishing and operating a depot at site r(r=1,,m); Fr: fixed costs of using vehicle k(k=1,,K); qj: average demands of customer j(j=1,2,,N); Ui: maximum throughput at depot i; Qk: capacity of vehicle k(k=1,,K); Decision variables: Xijk=1, traveling by vehicle k from node i to customer j ; 0 otherwise. Yi=1, depot i is established or opened; 0 otherwise. Mathematical Model for LRP is defined as follows.

(3) (4) (5) (6)

X
jH

ijk

Yi 0,

k V , i G

(8)

In this model, the objective function minimizes the total cost of routing, establishing and operating the facilities. Constraint (2) ensures that each customer is served by one and only one facility. Constraint (3) ensures that the total demands served by one facilities do not surplus its capacity, while (4) is the route continuity constraints, which implies that the vehicle should leave every point entered by the same vehicle. Constraint (5) guarantees that each vehicle is routed from one facility. Constraint (6) guarantees that there is no link between an two facilitys, Constraints (7) and (8) require that a vehicle only be from a facility if that facility is opened. II. TWO-PHASE METHOD FOR LOCATION-ROUTING PROBLEM

f ( x) = min( Gi y i + C ij X i jk
iG iG jH kV

+ Fk xijk )
kV iG jH

(1)

q
kV iS

subject to
ijk

= 1,

j H k V

(2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)

X ijk Qk ,
jS

X
iS

iH jH

ipk

X pjk = 0, k V , p S
ijk

X X
kV rG jH pqk

1,

k V

A. Two-phase approach In this paper a heuristic method which decomposes the MWLRP into the following two sub- problems is proposed: Phase 1. Location-allocation problem (LAP). Phase 2. Vehicle Routing problem (VRP).These sub-problems can be solved by either optimization techniques or heuristic methods iteratively and at the same time, the dependence between each sub-problem can be considered. In each iteration, current routes are unified to include more customers and allocated to selected. warehouses while taking into account the capacity restrictions of the warehouses. Since both LAP and VRP are well-known combinatorial optimization problems, heuristic methods that give quick and good solutions have been presented. In the 1rst iteration, the solutions of the LAP are some selected DC sites (only necessary ones, not all) and a plan for allocating customers to each chosen DC site. Notice that the calculation of the distance for the LAP in this iteration (the "rst) is based on the `moment-suma equation used by the traditional location problems. These solutions are then used as input to the VRP to generate a starting feasible set of routes. At this moment it is very possible that the number of DCs established can still be reduced. To achieve this objective, each current route consisting of several customers is viewed as a single node with the demand represented by the sum of demands of all customers in that route. These `big nodesa are then consolidated for reducing the number of DCs established and, thus, the total cost. The consolidation process starts from the second iteration and is performed by the LAP module, followed by the VRP module. This procedure is repeated until the convergence criterion is met.Maintaining the Integrity of the Specifications. B. Fundamental principle of PSO Like evolutionary algorithm, PSO conducts search using a population(called swarm) of individuals(called particle) that are updated from iteration to iteration. Each particle represents a candidate position(i.e., solution) to the problem at hand, resembling the chromosome of GA. A particle is treated as a point in an M-dimension space, and the status of

+Y p +Y q 2 p, q G
ijk

X
kV jH

Yi 0, i G

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a particle is characterized by its position and velocity. Initialized with a swarm of random particle, PSO is achieved through particle flying along the trajectory that will be adjusted based on the best experience or position of the one particle(called local best) and the best experience or position ever found by all particles(called global best). The Mdimension position for the ith iteration can be denoted as Xi(t)={xi1(t),xi2(t),xiM(t)},similarly, the velocity(i.e.,distance change),also a M-dimension vector, for the ith interationcan be described as Vi(t)={vi1(t),vi2(t),,viM(t)}, the particleupdating mechanism for particle flying(i.e., search process) can be formulated as follows:

rij = ( xi x j ) 2 + ( yi y j ) 2 , i G, j H
1) if

rij Ri then set the customer j served by facility

r K r

i, and then the customers served by facility i , Fi=(H1,H2,..,Hr) 2) if

d j > qk or
j =1 k =1

d
j =1

> U i , then transfer

Vi (t ) = w(t )Vi (t 1) +c 1 r1 ( X iL X i (t 1))

(12) Where i=1,2,,P, and P means the total number of the particles in a swarm, which is called population size; t=1,2,,T, and T means the iteration limit; L X iL = {xiL , xiL2 ,L, xiM } represents the local best of the 1 ith particle encountered after t-1 iterations, while G G X G = {x1G , x 2 ,L, x m } represents the global best among all the swarm of particles achieved so far. c1 and c2 are positive constants(namely, learning factors), and r1 and r2 are random numbers between 0 and 1; w(t) is the inertia weight used to control the impact of the previous velocities on the current velocity, influencing the trade-off between the global and local experiences. C .location phase In the location phase, our purpose is to determine a good configuration of facilities to used in the distribution. For each of the location configurations visited during the location phase, the routing phase is started in order to update the routing according to the new configuration. Since only a certain section of the routing is affected by the change in the depot configuration, it is possible to restrict the search to routing, thus, the routing phase is a localized search, as opposed to a global exploration of all routing moves, this eliminates a lot of unnecessary computation, and allows the two phase algorithm to find good solutions within reasonable computation time. Now, we define the element of location phase. (0) initialization of location: Suppose the positions of m candidate facilities are PF1(x1 ,y1), PF2(x2,y2),,PFm(Xm,ym), the distance of any PFi(xi ,yi) and PFj(xj ,yj) is dij:

+ c 2 r2 ( X G X i (t 1) X i(t ) = Vi (t ) + X i (t 1)

(11)

some customers to other sub-nearest facility, until the restrictions of capacity are satisfied. (1) Add move of location For a given number of facilities, the location phase can perform add moves, which opens one more facility randomly from other closed facilities. This operation will increase the fix cost of open facilities, but it also influence the distribution cost, so the total cost possibly decrease. If perform add move of location, firstly open a facility randomly, and then re-allocation the customers to new set of facilities as the operations of the initialization, which realize a updating of the location configuration. (2) Delete move of location For a given number of facilities, the location phase can also perform add moves, which closes one facility randomly from now open facilities, the operation influence the total cost obviously. Which firstly closes a facility randomly, and then re-allocation the customers to new set of facilities as add move operation, which also modifies the location configuration. D. Routing phase In each iteration, followed by the location phase, i.e. , given a current facilities configuration, a routing phase is started. This paper presented a novel particle swarm optimization algorithm for the VRP. (1) The particle representation In this section, we describe the formulation of a PSO algorithm for the VRP, one of the key issues in designing a successful PSO algorithm is the representation step, i.e. finding a suitable mapping between problem solution and PSO particle. In this paper, we reference the method in literatures[11,12] and setup a 2N-dimension search space, N is the number of customer to be served, 2N-dimension particle X can be regarded as two N-dimension vectors: the elements of Xv stand for the customers are served by different vehicle, and the element of Xr stand for the serves priority in the route of relevant vehicle. For example, in a given location configuration, there are 4 vehicle in depot i and 10 customers to be served, if a solution can be represented as the particle in table 1, then we should turn the Xv into integer, and if Xvi=Xvj(i,j=1,2,10),sort the order according to Xr, which is showed in table 2.

d ij = ( xi x j ) 2 + ( yi y j ) 2 Ri = 1 / 2 min(d ij | j G {i}) i G
Ri is the radius of cover area of facility i,

The set of customers H=(H1,H2,,Hn), the position of Hj=(xj,yj),

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TABLE I.

A PARTICLE REPRESENTATION FOR SOLUTION

customer 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Xv 1. 2 2. 1 1. 1 2. 5 3. 2 2. 2 3. 7 2. 7 3. 1 1. 2 Xr 1. 2 3. 4 5. 6 8. 1 2. 3 4. 6 2. 1 6. 2 4. 8 8. 1
TABLE II.

SHORT THE ORDER OF THE SOLUTIN IN

PARTICLE

customer 1 Xv 1 Xr 1

2 2 1

3 1 2

4 2 4

5 3 2

6 2 2

7 3 1

8 2 3

9 10 3 1 3 3

Step2: Repeat until the number of generation equal to maximum generation number or satisfy the stop situation. 1) For each particle, update X and V according to equation (2) and equation (3), the updated particle position must be subject to the limit[Xmin,Xmax]=[1,M], each element of the 2N-dimension particle that is beyond [Xmin,Xmax] can be adjusted as: if Xi(t)>Xmax, then Xi(t)=Xmax ; else if Xi(t)<Xmin, then Xi(t)=Xmin; and each element of the 2Ndimension particle velocity that is beyond [-Vmax,Vmin]=[N,N] should be adjusted as: if Vi(t)>Vmax then Vi(t)=Vmax, else if Vj(t)<-Vmax, then Vj(t)=-Vmax. 2) Turn the 2N-dimension particle X into appropriated representation as section III(B). 3) Evaluate the fitness of all particle in the new population; 4) update the Gbest, if one particles fitness is better than current Gbest; for each particle, if the fitness is better than its Pbest, then update it; Step 3: Stop the PSO and get the approximately optimal solution The PSO execution should be terminated if the current iteration meets any one of the stop signals. The stop signals considered here include: (1) maximum number of iterations with steady global best(i.e., maximum number of iterations since last updating of the global best) and (2) maximum total number of iterations. Then the optimal solution to LRP has been got, which corresponds to the global best particlerepresentation. E. Total procedure of proposed method Total procedure of proposed method can be scribbled as follows: Step 1:finding the initial location configuration Perform the initialization operation of location phase; Step 2: finding the routing of now location configuration Perform the routing phase using our proposed PSO algorithm, which is stated as section 3.4. Step 3 Calculate the total costs by original objective function which is stated in formula (1), records the current best costs and the solution. Step 4: updating the location configuration For the given location configuration, perform randomly the add moves of location or delete moves, the numbers of add moves and delete moves of location can be generated randomly from [0,P], P is the maximum number of permission to add or delete the facility. Step 5: return to step 2 until the number of generation equal to maximum generation number or satisfy the stop situation, which can be considered that maximum number of iterations since last updating of the best solution. III. 4.EXPERIMENTAL RESULT

The particle represents that related routes for vehicle are: route 1(vehicle 1): 0-1-3-10-0; route 2(vehicle 2): 0-26-8-4-0; route 3(vehicle 3): 0-7-5-9-0 , where 0 denote the depot, which is the begin and end of the route. This representation makes each customer can be served by only one routing/vehicle, and number and amount of selected vehicle also can be embodied. Though number of dimension is increased, PSO shows the good characteristic in multi-dimension optimization, the computation complication does not increase observably. (1) the modified objective function LRP is a restricted combined optimization problem, formulation 3 scripts the restriction of route capacity, that is, the sum of demand to be served of one vehicle can not surplus its capacity. This paper adopts a modified objective function that includes a penalty term associated with infeasible, R is a large number used as penalty coefficient, which multiples the overload, then is added to the objective function. The modified objective function as follow:

F ( x) = min( Gi y i + C ij X i jk +
iG iG jH kV M

F x
k kV iG jH

ijk

+ max( C ij X ijk q,0))

i =1 i =1

(2) Procedure of the PSO algorithm for VRP The procedure of the PSO can be stated as follow: step1: initialize the particle swarm, 1) For each 2N-dimension particle in the population, the position vector Xv={X1,X2,,XN}, each element is randomly generated from 1~M, and Xr={XN+1,XN+2,,X2N} randomly from 1~N; 2) Each velocity vector is also 2N-dimension, Vv={V1,V2,,VN}, each element is randomly generated from -M~M, and Vr={VN+1,VN+2,,V2N} randomly from -N~N; 3) Evaluate the fitness of each particle in the population, the fitness function is described as formula (13) 4) Initialize the Gbest with the best fitness (lowest cost) among the population. 5) Initialize the Pbest with a copy the population;

Numerical experiments were conducted to examine the computational effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. The heuristic methods are coded using the Visual
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C++ programming language and the tests are carried out on a PC Pentium 1.8GHZ. The demand for each customer in any test is randomly selected from a uniform distribution U[450, 600] for each month. The demand during lead time for each customer is randomly selected from a uniform distribution U [0, 10]. The location (x, y) of each customer and candidate depot is randomly selected from a uniform distribution U[0, 100]. The other relevant cost values are listed in table and some parameters used in PSO are listed in table .
TABLE III. OTHER RELEVANT COST VALUES USED IN THE

other heuristic method described earlier, which is presented in literature 13. It is found that our method is better than Tabu-Search based method in total costs. And also, when the number of candidate depots increases, the total system costs for all the two solutions decrease. When the number of customers increases, the total system costs for all the three heuristic solutions increase.. However, in terms of average CPU time. these two methods are efficient, for all average CPU times in Table 3 are less than 30 seconds. IV. CONCLUSION

Vehicle type Vehi cl e capaci ty Fixed cost of vehicle using Distribution Cost ratio Depot establishing Cost

Type 1 8 100

Type 2 4 60 4 / Ton. Km

Type 3 2 40

1200(high), 700(low)

TABLE IV. W(t) 1 C1 1

PARAMETERS USED IN PSO FOR ROUTING PHASE C2 1.5 Population Size 100 Penalty coefficient R 108 Maximum iterations 50

In this paper, a two-phase method based on particle swarm optimization for Location-Routing problem is proposed. In the second phase, the paper adopts novel particle representation to correspond to the integrated optimization problem in logistics, and modifies the objective function with additive penalty function part in order to get the feasible solution. From an illustrational example, the availability and performance of proposed method can be approved. Further two related research directions are as follows: (1)develop a model and methods for the multi- product multi-depot location-routing problem, and (2) develop the hybrid PSO method with other possible intelligent optimization algorithm to solute more complex locationrouting problem. REFERENCES [1]Tai-His Wu, Chinyao Low, Jiunn-Wei Bai. Heuristic solution to multi-facility location-routing problems. Computers &operations Research.2002;29:1393-1415. [2]Webb MHJ. Cost functions in the location of facility for multiple delivery journal Research Quarterly. 1968; 19:31120. [3]Salhi S,Rand GK. The effect of ignoring routes when locating facilitys. European Journal of Operational Research.1989;19:311-20. [4]Nagy G,Salhi S. Nested heuristic methods for the location-routing problem. Journal of operational Research Society.1996;47:1166-74. [5]Nagy G, Salhi S. A nested location-routing heuristic using route length estimation. Studies in Locational Analysis. 1996;10:109-27. [6]Chen TW. Heuristic procedures for practical-sized uncapacitated location-capcitated routing problem. Decision Sciences. 1993;24:995-1021. [7]Min H,Jayaraman V,Srivastava R. Combined locationrouting problem:a synthesis and future research directions. European Journal of Operational Research. 1998;108:1-15. [8]Maria Albareda-Sambola, Juan A, Diaz, Elena Fernandez. A compact model and tight bounds for a combined location-routing problem. Computer & Operations Research. 2005;32:407-428.

TABLE V. RESULTS FOR THE ILLUSTRATIONAL PROBLEM COMPARED WITH OTHER METHOD

number number of of depots customers 10 100 10 150 10 180 10 200 10 220 20 100 20 150 20 180 20 200 20 250 25 200 25 220 25 250 25 300 25 350

Tabu Search Based PSO cost cpu cost cpu 79542 8 79238 9 121564 10 110256 10 156325 11 152357 11 162321 13 160241 14 173243 14 172314 14 67356 7 67135 7 102325 9 110234 8 121325 11 121034 10 134241 12 128967 12 142315 14 147782 15 124531 14 122215 14 131025 15 130021 16 150124 15 145781 15 162437 17 161325 17 180219 19 179324 18

Table shows the average solutions and average CPU times for this proposed two-phase PSO based method and

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[9]S.C.Liu, S.B.Lee. A two-phase heuristic method for the muti-facility location routing problem taking inventory control decisions into consideration. Int J Adv Manuf Technol. 2003;22:941-950. [10]Kennedy J, Eberhart RC. Particle swarm optimization. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Neural Networks.(1995)1942-1948. [11]Eberhart RC.Shi Y. Particle swarm optimization: developments, applications and resources. Proc .Congress on evolutionary computation, 2001, Seoul, Korea.P.81-6. [12]Ayed Salman,Imtiaz Ahmad,Sabah Al-Madani. Partical swarm optimizaion for task assignment problem. Microprocessors and Microsystems. 2002,26:363-371

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