A SERVICE LOGISTICS MODEL FOR SIMULTANEOUS SITING OF FACILITIES AND MULTIPLE LEVELS OF EQUIPMENT

Service Logistics aims at the most efficient utilization of facilities , minimizing the cost of excess capacity, while making the service mor e responsive to customer demands. Location of facilities and allocatio n of equipment to facilities is an important decision making area in s ervice logistics. Earlier models [1-3] developed to address this issue either consider all demands to be covered or all demands cannot be co vered because of equipment unavailability. Most of the models develope d in the literature only consider single type of equipment usage. We d evelop a model for the multiple facility, multiple levels of equipment problem called the Multiple Equipment Multiple Cover facility Locatio n-Allocation problem (MEMCOLA) which considers maximal coverage of dem and, including multiple coverage of demand by equipment of a specific type, given that each equipment has a certain probability of being una vailable. MEMCOLA simultaneously locates a given number of facilities and allocates different types of equipment to the facilities.