Deciding the locations of facilities for a business is a difficult strategic decision.
In the paper entitled “Maintenance location routing for rolling stock under line a fleet planning uncertainty”, a forthcoming publication in Transportation Science, Joachim Arts, Associate Professor at the Luxembourg Center for Logistics and Supply Chain Management, University of Luxembourg and his co-authors study where to locate maintenance facilities in a railway network.
These maintenance facilities should be located in the network such that it is easy to route trains to this location so that the network can remain up and running at all times. The added challenge is that these facility locations should work well in a wide variety of future scenarios in which line plans and fleet sizes will grow or change otherwise. This challenge is met in this paper by using advanced two-stage mathematical programming algorithms.