Title: Innovative local search heuristics for uncapacitated facility location problem

Authors: Shahed Sholekar; Mehdi Seifbarghy; Davar Pishva

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering, Qazvin Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qazvin, Iran ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran ' Faculty of Asia Pacific Studies, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, 1-1 Jumonjibaru, Beppu, Oita 874-8577, Japan

Abstract: This paper presents four different local search heuristics, abbreviated as PSC, PSTC, PTSC and PFSC, for handling the UFLP. It compares their outcome with that of a previously proposed equivalent heuristic called add-swap neighbourhood search (ASNS). One of its main focus is to reduce processing time since ASNS heuristic's computational time is quite long and continues to increase in an exponential order with magnitude of the problem. The proposed heuristics use a two-phase approach wherein the first phase ranks the potential facilities' locations and selects an initial solution from the ranking; and the second phase keeps on adding other locations from the ranking list, one at a time, until the stop criterion is achieved. Its results show that the proposed heuristics reduce computational time dramatically when compared with the ASNS. Furthermore, the PFSC heuristic provides better performance in both computational time and solution quality when dealing with large size problems.

Keywords: location; UFLP; uncapacitated; local search; heuristics; mixed-integer programming.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2022.126039

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2022 Vol.42 No.2, pp.172 - 192

Received: 30 Jan 2020
Accepted: 06 Jan 2021
Published online: 10 Oct 2022 *

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