The location-routing problem is a research area that simultaneously solves location-allocation and vehicle routing issues. It is critical to delivering emergency goods to customers with high reliability. In this paper, reliability in location and routing problems was considered as the probability of failure in depots, vehicles, and routs. The problem has two objectives, minimizing the cost and maximizing the reliability, the latter expressed by minimizing the expected cost of failure. First, a mathematical model of the problem was presented and due to its NP-hard nature, it was solved by a meta-heuristic approach using a NSGA-II algorithm and a discrete multi-objective firefly algorithm. The efficiency of these algorithms was studied through a complete set of examples and it was found that the multi-objective discrete firefly algorithm has a better Diversification Metric (DM) index; the Mean Ideal Distance (MID) and Spacing Metric (SM) indexes are only suitable for small to medium problems, losing their effectiveness for big problems.
Solving a bi-objective location routing problem by a NSGA-II combined with clustering approach: application in waste collection problem