A mathematical model for industrial electric vehicles location allocation problem

In today's competitive manufacturing world, reducing material handling cost is one of the most important issues to provide a competitive advantage in respect of customer preference. Industrial electric vehicles are efficient material handling facilities for loading and unloading operations in the context of low energy consumption and utilization. The main disadvantage of these vehicles is usability in a limited time period. Thus, their chargeability and utility must be planned in order to be used more effectively. While planning, the manager should consider the maximum distance they travel without being out of charge. This study aims to minimize the energy consumption considering the distance traveled by each industrial electric vehicle between material- station-charge station points under optimal routing, allocating and locating decisions. Various theoretical approaches regarding to location-allocation problems are discussed, and a new mathematical model is developed for minimizing the distance in a predetermined timeline while locating the charging stations and assigning tasks of picking and loading materials to machines by electric material handling vehicles. The nonlinear model is solved by IBM ILOG OPL IDE.