Allocation Location Analysis

The problem of allocation location has been remarkably distinguished throughout the field of network design. Location-allocation refers to algorithms used primarily in a geographic information system to determine an optimal location for one or more facilities that will service demand from a given set of points. Algorithms can assign those demand points to one or more facilities, taking into account factors such as the number of facilities available, their cost, and the maximum impedance from a facility to a point. There are also several approaches as long as methodologies which were developed to clarify this problem. Through courses that we attended in Industrial and Systems Engineering department such as ‘Logistics Engineering and Supply Chain

Nowadays, there are four modes of transportation: airway, roadway, water way and rail way. The unit of multimodal transportation can be varied from and swap between the bulk, box, lot and container, etc. (Multimodal Freight Transportation Planning Overview, 2013)
Intermodal transportation is a part of multimodal transportation. Intermodal transportation considers only a consistent unit of transportation throughout the network and the planning horizon (such as TEU). Therefore, the application often eliminates the transshipment between the containers and state of goods. It is applicable to a large network with long and global

There are hub and spoke network design as the strategic level and the service network design as the tactical and operational level. The hub and spoke network design problem is one of the most popular. The hub is a place to consolidate goods and its potential location is the intersection of different transportation lines: rail, road, sea and air. It considers the design and planning facilities that served transportation and logistics activities on a large region. The problem is considered as strategic planning and design. Based on the demand of transportation, the researchers try to find the optimum location of hubs, which origin and destination pair will be served by these hubs. The transportation and logistics flows will be optimized in order to minimize the cost, and preserve the quantity of goods from starting nodes and the required ending nodes. Moreover, they also consider the expansion of the service of hubs, such as transshipment service and the link of hub. Some of the researches decide the expansion based on the quantity of goods and vehicles on the routes and links through sensitivity analysis; some consider these decisions as the variables to balance the flow between the routes of the total network. This type of design is effectively applied for a large region with long transportation distance due to the scope of the model and the detailed of the parameters.