Facility location with uncertain demand and economies of scale

This paper adresses facility location under uncertain demand. The problem is to determine the optimal location of facilities and allocation of uncertain customer demand to these facilities. The costs of operating the facilities are subject to economies of scale. The objective is to minimize the total expected costs. These costs can be split into two parts: firstly the costs of investing in a facility as well as maintaining and operating it with strictly diminishing average costs, and secondly linear transportation cost. We formulate the problem as a two-stage stochastic programming model and present a solution method based on Lagrangian Relaxation. We also show some computional results based on data from the Norwegian meat industry regarding the location of slaughterhouses