A Metaheuristic for a Two Echelon Location-Routing Problem

In this paper we consider the design problem of a two-echelon freight distribution system. The aim is to define the structure of a system optimizing the location and the number of two different kinds of facilities, the size of two different vehicle fleets and the related routes on each echelon. The problem has been modeled as a two-echelon location-routing problem (2E-LRP). A tabu-search heuristic efficiently combining the composing subproblems is presented. Results on small, medium and large size instances are reporte