Research on dynamic facility location-allocation considering maintenance stations in agriculture

Agricultural machinery is prone to failure because of excessive operations and complicated environment in busy time, and existing maintenance stations cannot meet the increasing demands. The dynamic vehicles are provided to cooperate with maintenance stations to supply timely service for malfunction equipment. Therefore, this study concentrates on the location-allocation of dynamic vehicles considering the capacity and location of maintenance stations. A mixed integer programming model is formulated for minimal service costs, including the service mileage costs of maintenance stations and the usage and travelling costs of dynamic vehicles. The model linearization method and several strengthening constraints are adopted with commercial solver Gurobi. A real case in China is introduced to demonstrate the performance of optimization model and solution approach.