Designing Networks with Generalised Flow and Piecewise Linear Cost

Network design models have been considered for a long time to solve practical problems from different areas such as transportation planning, distribution network design, or communication networks design, and ever since, these models and the development of efficient solution methods have been a major cornerstone in Operations Research.

In this book, network design theory is applied to solve a real world supply chain design problem faced by companies from the chemical industry. Compared to standard network design problems, these chemical supply chain design problems are complicated by economies of scale in transportation and warehousing, and by the availability of different shipping schedules. Based on a first, straightforward formulation and solution method, a new, extended class of network design problems is introduced, which extends ordinary problems of this type by considering piecewise-linear cost and generalised flow multipliers. To solve this new class of problems, an adopted branch-and-bound algorithm is described and compared against standard solution methods. Finally, an extension to network design problems under uncertainty is discussed.

This book is relevant to both scholars and practioners interested in supply chain design and network optimization theory.