Title
Optimal search path for service in the presence of disruptions
Abstract
We consider the following basic search path problem: a customer residing at a node of a network needs to obtain service from one of the facilities; facility locations are known and fixed. Facilities may become inoperational with certain probability; the state of the facility only becomes known when the facility is visited. Customer travel stops when the first operational facility is found. The objective is to minimize the expected total travel distance. We show that this problem is NP-hard and develop a forward dynamic programming procedure. The efficiency of this procedure is improved by utilizing the special structure of the network and features of the optimal search paths. Polynomial procedures are developed for path and cycle networks. Through a set of computational experiments we show that the ''visit closest unvisited facility'' heuristic is quite efficient, especially when the failure probability is small. Our results substantiate optimal location models that rely on the behavioral assumptions of this heuristic.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1016/j.cor.2011.01.015
Computers & OR
Keywords
DocType
Volume
facility location,closest unvisited facility,certain probability,operational facility,failure probability,Reliability,Networks,dynamic programming procedure,optimal search path,following basic search path,expected total travel distance,cycle network,Routing,Optimal search,customer travel
Journal
38
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
11
Computers and Operations Research
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.38
6
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
O. Berman11604231.36
EDUARD IANOVSKY260.99
Dmitry Krass348382.08