Abstract:
In today’s extremely competitive marketplace, firms are facing the need to meet or
exceed increasing customer expectations while cutting costs to stay competitive in a
global market. To develop competitive advantage in this business climate, companies
must make informed decisions regarding their supply chain.
In recent years, supply chain networks have received increasing attention among
companies. The decision makers confront the network design problem in different
situations. In order to make decisions, especially in strategic supply chain
management, decision makers must have a holistic view of all the components.
Supply chain network design, particular facility location problems, is one of the most
complex strategic decision problems in supply chain management
The aim of this dissertation is to make an inquiry about the facility location problems
and related issues in supply chain and logistics management, and the use of modelling
approaches to solve these problems.
The methodology is to construct a review protocol by forming a review panel, and
developing a detailed search strategy with clear inclusion and exclusion criteria. In
addition, the measurement for evaluating the quality of studies is presented with a
strategy for extracting data and synthesising the methodologies.
The search results show the background of the facility location problems, the
importance and the basic questions of these problems. The taxonomy of facility
location problems with eighteen factors is presented. The basic static and
deterministic problems in facility location including the covering, centre, median and
fixed charge problems are discussed. Also, the extension of facility location problems
comprises of location-allocation, multi-objective, hierarchical, hub, undesirable and
competitive problems. In terms of uncertainty, dynamic, stochastic and robust facility
location problems are presented.
Finally, strengths and weaknesses of different modelling approaches are discussed;
importantly, gaps from the review process are indentified. Recommendations of
future research are described; and the facility location problem to be addressed by the
proposed research is shown. In addition, contributions of the proposed facility
location problem are illustrated.
