H. Edwin Romeijn, Dolores Romero Morales
An asymptotically optimal greedy heuristic for the multi-period single-sourcing problem: the cyclic case
The multi-period single-sourcing problem that we address in this paper can be used as a strategic tool for evaluating logistics network designs in a dynamic environment. The logistics network design issues that are dealt with are the assignment of customers to warehouses, as well as the location, timing and size of inventories. We propose a greedy heuristic, and prove that this heuristic is asymptotically optimal in a probabilistic sense. We illustrate the behaviour of the heuristic, as well as some improvements where the heuristic is used as the starting point of a local interchange procedure, on a set of randomly generated test problems.