Online retailers invest an enormous amount of funds in delivering products to customers. In recent years, these delivery costs have increased as a result of changes in fuel costs, which has brought new challenges to retailers in terms of offering competitive prices. Many retailers have begun to utilize a drone-based aerial delivery system as an alternative solution to overcome the problems related to the high transportation costs and traffic jams in large cities. This study provides a mathematical model for minimizing the total costs of the aerial delivery system concerned with refuel stations, warehouses, drone procurement, and transportation. The waiting time of the customers is restricted based on the M/G/K queueing system. The fuel stations and warehouses are the main components of the network. The demand (occurring at the lowest level) is ultimately satisfied via launch stations (the network's highest level). Refuel stations support drones along their long routes between the launch stations and demand points. To account for the different levels of the facilities, a multi-level facility location approach is utilized. Moreover, the nondeterministic nature of the problem is tackled using fuzzy variables. The ultimate mathematical model is a congested fuzzy capacitated multi-level facility location problem that is solved by the possibilistic approach.
A novel optimization problem of carton box manufacturing industries is introduced in this paper. A mixed integer linear formulation with multiple objective functions is developed in order to determine the value of some criteria of carton raw sheets such as size, amount, and supplier under simultaneous minimization of multiple goals such as purchasing cost of raw sheets under discount policy, wastage remained from raw sheets, and quantity of surplus of carton boxes. In order to cope with the unstable market of this sector, some parameters of the proposed formulation such as demand value of the products and price given for raw sheets are assumed to be fuzzy numbers. To tackle such fuzzy multiobjective problem, first, the fuzzy problem is converted to a crisp form using the concepts of necessity‐based chance‐constrained modelling approach. Then a new hybrid form of the fuzzy programming approach is proposed to solve the obtained crisp multiobjective problem effectively. Computational experiments on a real case given by a carton box factory show the superior result of the proposed solution approach compared with the well‐known multiobjective solution methods taken from the literature.
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