Research on the Layout of National Economic Mobilization Logistics Centers

Published Online November 2010 in MECS

It is a very important task to use scientific and reasonable method to determine the national economy mobilization logistics center (hereinafter referred to mobilization logistics center). Reasonable layout is to transport the mobilization materials from the NEMLCs to the demanding place by using the least transport capacity, the shortest distance, minimal cost, the least link and the fastest speed. When distributing the NEMLCs, the material supplying to the mobilization demanding point in time was the most important problem which the mobilization host considers. NEMLCs are able to provide the right guarantee from the right place at the right time. This also puts forward the stringent mobilization time to the mobilization logistics system. If the mobilization time is too long, it may lose the significance of mobilization implementation when the mobilization materials shipped to the demand place. Therefore, the study on the layout of NEMLCs has a major economic, social and military

Supported by “the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities”

Sponsored by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) 71071054

significance. In practice, due to the urgency of mobilization demand, it sometimes may not meet the requirements of mobilization time when building only one mobilization logistics center. Also, setting up only one mobilization logistics center in the large area range is neither consistent with economic principle, nor is the principle of time limit. Therefore, several mobilization logistics center should be built.

During the distribution of mobilization logistics centers, each NEMLC can be viewed as a saving point. In response to war or crisis event, one or more NEMLCs of the region fulfill the functions of mobilization implementation. In general, the more the NEMLCs involved in the implementation, the shorter the mobilization time, and the faster the speed. However, during the process of mobilization implementation, each NEMLC is a mobilization of insecure factor. Especially during the war process, the NEMLC may be enemy targets as the main suppliers of mobilization material. The less saving point may result in the long mobilization time and insufficient material supply. Saving can not have blind spots, so in the time constraints, for any emergency place, there should have at least one to reach within the time limit. On the other hand, when too many NEMLCs are build in the region, some NEMLCs may have not mobilization task. So, these will inevitably result in not only the waste of pertinent resources which mainly include transport, storage, and information, but also huge waste of construction costs and management costs of the NEMLC. Therefore, when distributing the NEMLCs, mobilization host should consider all circumstances synthetically, so that results of the NEMLCs layout can satisfy the needs of mobilization material, but also the economic of mobilization cost.

• II.    LAYOUT MODEL

The maximum characteristic of mobilization demand is the time urgency, when mobilization demand happens, mobilization goods or service are always expected to be conveyed from NEMLC to the mobilization demand site as soon as possible. So time becomes the main optimization goal of the NEMLC layout. During the layout of the NEMLC, the mobilization demand site can be treated as the vertex of network graph, the connection line(arc) between vertex and vertex as the distance between two points， but also can be seen as the time required when the speed is constant. Vertex weights, hi , stands for the frequency of mobilization requirements. So, the layout problem of the entire NEMLC can be abstracted as an undirected weighted graph.

Given an undirected continuous network graph G= ( V, E ) , which V is non-empty vertex set of graph G , and E is the arc set that connecting the vertex.

V = ^{{ V} 1 , ^V 2 , ^L , v n }

E = {ei, e2,L , en} hi is the weight of vertex vi, b(ei) is the length of arc ei. If the arc ei connects the vertex vp and vq, then the arc ei can be expressed as b(ei)= b(vp, vq). The shortest path between any two points x, y of G can also be expressed as d(x, y).