Strategic planning problem represented by a three-echelon logistics network-modeling and solving

This article aims to elaborate a strategic plan allowing to decision makers to take right decisions (Selecting suppliers, Selecting plants that can produce a specific product, ..) in the right moment in order to minimize the generated costs. Our work consists, then to optimize a multi-scales and multi-periods location-distribution problem. The problem belongs to the FLNP family with a complexity of order of NP-difficult. The objective of our problem MIP is to maximize the incomes of a production company via the minimization of costs: the cost of supplying, the cost of producing and the cost of transportation. Several aspects would be treated in this subject: the horizon of planning -multi-periods and the structure of network (multi-echelons). Based on the limits of exact methods, we have proposed to resolve this problem on the basis of a heuristic method, the choice which seems to be the most adequate for our problem is LNS (Large Neighborhood Search). It is in this perspective that we have reformulated our model {[}12] in order to be represented under the form of a logistic network based on paths before the application of LNS.