Heuristic Decision for Static and Dynamic Service Facility Location in Agricultural Maintenance Service Network

Agricultural maintenance service network is built by the manufacturer to provide timely maintenance for failed machinery. However, maintenance demands increase sharply in the busy farming season due to continuous agricultural production, and service vehicles are provided by the manufacturer to compensate for the inadequate capacity of existing service facilities. This paper focuses on dynamic moving and geographical distributed agricultural machinery and considers the static and dynamic service facilities location and service unit districting problem. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer programming to minimize total service costs, including vehicle transfer costs and service mileage costs, which consider dynamic demands and contiguity constraints. To solve the complex problem, an effective solution algorithm integrating genetic algorithm and tabu search method is designed to select the location of static service stations and service vehicles. The service districting problem is addressed simultaneously. Last, apractical application in Henan is introduced to verify the application of the proposed approach and computational results are illustrated to demonstrate the sensitivity analysis in the real case.