A Heuristic for the Multisource Weber Problem with Service Level Constraints

In this paper we develop a column-generation-based heuristic procedure to solve a generalized version of the multisource Weber problem where in addition to the transportation cost we also consider staffing level costs that arise due to consideration of service level constraints. Traditional solution procedures for the multisource Weber problem do not take into account the staffing costs. Our contribution is towards addressing this gap. We develop a lower bound for the problem using which we evaluate the performance of the heuristic procedure on problems of different sizes and cost parameters. Our computational experience indicates that problems with up to 100 customer regions can be solved using the heuristic within five minutes of computational time on average. The average gap is less than 5% for a majority of problem instances.