Odisha Craft – crafting the right expansion strategy

Learning outcomes Familiarize with the retail operations of handicrafts, facility location problem, apply multi-criteria decision through the goal programming approach and solving the same with MS Excel. Case overview / synopsis The case portrays a dilemma in the context of retail operations of a small-scale handicraft company known as Odisha Craft. Located in Odisha, Susanta Mohanty, the owner, was finding it a challenge to decide on the most promising location for his new retail outlet in the neighbouring city of Kolkata. He had five choices for the locations. Odisha craft was established by his father-in-law in 2009 with an objective to preserve and promote the rich culture of the handicrafts designed by the local artisans and ensure sustainable rural livelihood. The company had been facing numerous challenges and the pandemic has given a very formidable blow to the monthly revenues. The case brings out the multi-faceted dilemma of deciding on the facility location in 2020, involving a set of conflicting criteria. The case unfolds a systematic solution approach resolving the dilemma using MS Excel. Complexity academic level Courses such as operations research, operations management, service operations and retail operations for MBA students and trainings for junior-middle level executives. Supplementary materials Teaching notes are available for educators only. Subject code CSS 09: Operations and Logistics

The Connected P -Median Problem on Cactus Graphs

This study deals with the facility location problem of locating a set V p of p facilities on a graph such that the subgraph induced by V p is connected. We consider the connected p -median problem on a cactus graph G whose vertices and edges have nonnegative weights. The aim of a connected p -median problem is to minimize the sum of weighted distances from every vertex of a graph to the nearest vertex in V p . We provide an O n 2 p 2 time algorithm for the connected p -median problem, where n is the number of vertices.

Robust facility location in reverse logistics

As environmental awareness is becoming increasingly important, alternatives are needed for the traditional forward product flows of supply chains. The field of reverse logistics covers activities that aim to recover resources from their final destination, and acts as the foundation of the efficient backward flow of these materials. Designing the appropriate reverse logistics network for a given field is a crucial problem, as this provides the basis for all operations connected to the resource flow. This paper focuses on design questions in the supply network of waste wood, dealing with its collection and transportation to designated processing facilities. The facility location problem is studied for this use-case, and mathematical models are developed that consider economies of scale and the robustness of the problem. A novel approach based on bilevel optimization is used for computing the exact solutions of the robust problem on smaller instances. A local search and a tabu search method is also introduced for solving problems of realistic sizes. The developed models and methods are tested both on real-life and artificial instance sets in order to assess their performance.

ARPA: An autonomous renderer placement algorithm in distributed multimedia fog networks with delay guarantees

Multimedia cloud computing has emerged as a popular paradigm for the support of delay-intolerable immersive multimedia applications with high-end three-dimensional rendering. To that end, fog computing offers distributed computational offloading solutions, by positioning rendering servers in close proximity to end users promising in this way continuous service provision, that is otherwise not easily attainable under the strictly centralized cloud-only model. Yet, in order to alleviate the multimedia providers from unnecessary capital expenditure, a strategic placement approach of the servers at the fog layer must be implemented, that can effectively cope both with the network dynamics and the overall imposed deployment cost, and still adhere to the delay bounds set forth by the multimedia application. In this paper, we formally formulate the problem as a facility location problem using constrained optimization over a finite time horizon. We then theoretically analyze the minimum acceptable conditions necessary for a decentralized location of the servers, utilizing solely local information around their immediate neighborhood, that iteratively leads to better solutions. Based on the analysis, we propose a distributed algorithm, namely the Autonomous Renderer Placement Algorithm (ARPA), to address it. ARPA employs localized service relocation to shift the placement according to simple rules that designate elastic migration, replication, and complementary consolidation of the underlying renderers. Simulation results under diversified deployment scenarios, as well as trace-driven comparisons against other approaches, testify to ARPA's accountability in obeying the delay limits and fast converge in finite time slots to a placement solution that both outperforms the baseline alternatives and is close to the optimal one, rendering it suitable for scaling up and down to meet the current demands of the offered multimedia applications.

Using Hierarchical Facility Location, Single Facility Approach, and GIS in Carsharing Services

In the last few years, vehicle sharing has driven a gradual switch from ownership-based private mobility to service usage as a sustainable urban transport alternative. A significant number of cities have implemented mobility sharing programs. Shared transport reduces both traffic congestion, and the need for parking space, decreasing the number of vehicles on the road. The optimization of shared mobility service sites increases potential user access, reduces transportation costs, and augments demand for this transportation modality. Car sharing is a mobility concept where the usage of a vehicle fleet is shared among several people. This is a relatively new concept of transport, with short vehicle rental periods. It provides the convenience of private vehicles without additional charges. A key success factor is the location of sharing stations. The study presented here refers to a car sharing service to be operated by a carmaker in the city of São Paulo (Brazil). This article aims to identify and to select the best places to establish sharing stations within the company’s dealer and servicing network. A geographic information system (GIS) calculates spatial distribution of potential trip demand. Two models of hierarchical facility location are used to determine ideal station locations. It also suggests potential local partners to house car-sharing stations, such as hotels and private car parks. Voronoi diagrams support the location task. The recent rediscovery of Weber’s classic unique facility location problem has also been applied. The selection criterion was to maximize demand and hence operator profit, while minimizing obstacles like the distance to stations.