A genetic algorithm approach to the bi-criteria allocation of customers to warehouses

In today's customer-centric business environment, a firm's ability to allocate its customers to available warehouses can be translated into a competitive advantage. With its increasing significance, the problem of allocating a set of customers to multiple warehouses has begun to draw attention from practitioners and academicians alike. This paper proposes a mathematical model and an efficient solution procedure for the bi-criteria allocation problem involving multiple warehouses with different capacities. The proposed solution procedure utilizes a genetic algorithm that is designed to find Pareto optimal solutions for this problem in a short period of time. The application of the proposed model and solution procedure to a real-world problem demonstrates its usefulness and practicality. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.