Combined Location Models

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Early location models assumed that facilities can serve all customers without delay, that they never fail and that decisions on inventory and marketing can be made separately. The proposed research aims at relaxing these assumptions and to investigate 4 major directions of combined location models: 1. Reliability-Location Models: Facilities can and do fail due to many reasons. This research seeks to gain a better understanding of how failures affect the optimal location decisions. I suggest 5 directions where we relax some of the strong assumptions of prior work in the area. The work will assist managers in making budget allocation decisions on constructing new facilities, on improving reliability of existing ones and on improving the information system. 2. Inventory-Location Models: In recent years, there have been great efforts to achieve integration of strategic and tactical decisions through the development of inventory-location models. The main decisions involve finding the number of facilities, their locations and the amount of inventory to order. I suggest 6 research directions showing the advantages of making joint inventory and location decisions. 3. Queuing-Location Models: Due to limited capacity and random demand and service, facilities may be congested and customers may have to wait for service. We focus on two types of queuing-location models: (i) Location models with elastic demand and (ii) joint location-pricing models. I suggest 8 directions including extension of existing models by relaxing some limiting assumptions and developing new models that can help managers to improve the quality of service. 4. Marketing-Location Models: Innovative new products are introduced to the market more often than in the past and the lifecycles of the existing products keep getting shorter. Sales of new products or services are affected by the perceived quality of the product or service formed by customers, the marketing efforts and the travel distance to the facilities. I suggest 3 directions in this completely new research area.