Model and algorithm of flow interception problem with multi-type of flows

To study simultaneous location of different kinds of facilities, a new model of flow interception problem with multi-type of flows is proposed, with the consideration of multi-purpose flows and the influence of facilities on each other. To be more practical, the objective is to maximize the benefits from flow-by customers instead of maximizing flows in the past. Since this problem is NP-hard and there is no optimal solution for large network, greedy and improved greedy heuristic algorithms are proposed. A computational example is presented to show that the optimal location decisions are proved to be strongly dependent on the influence coefficients and average profits by one customer and different types of facilities are almost co-located. Finally the results of sensitivity analysis are reported.