Moses Charikar, Ted Giford, Adam Meyerson, R. Ravi

Optimization problems in Logistics typically involve location of facilities and transportation of goods between them, all at minimum cost. Facility location problems require selecting a set of centers (facilities) in order to minimize the distance between each point from a given data set and its closest center. There are many variations on this theme, involving different notions of distance and placing possible additional constraints on the legal set of selected centers.

These problems are essential in a wide variety of applications, including supply chain management, design of computer networks, and data mining. The goal of this PROBE is to build a stronger link between the diverse communities dealing with these problems, bridging operations research and computer science to share useful techniques for solving facility location instances.

The PROBE also aims to bridge the gap between researchers in Operations Research, Data Mining, Computer Networking, and Computer Science in order to design better algorithms for the variants of the problem which most need to be solved, and to share useful techniques in approaching them. We will place particular emphasis in discussing the integration of facility location models and transportation network design models that have traditionally decoupled in the process of logistic design. We aim to formulate new meaningful models at this intersection and stimulate more work in this are.

In order to accomplish this, it will be essential to build an online repository for the many variations of the problem and the techniques (both algorithmic and heuristic) which have been used to attack them. This repository will enable programmers to download code for various theoretically sound approaches to the problems, and also assist theorists working to extend existing techniques to the problem variants most useful in industry.

A source for OR test instances (including some logistics problems)
Integrated Logistics Workshop II , Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, March 27-29, 2003
Integrated Logistics Workshop, Princeton, New Jersey, October 31- November 1, 2002