Title: A swarm intelligence approach for the p-median problem

Authors: B. Jayalakshmi; Alok Singh

Addresses: School of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad 500 046, India ' School of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad 500 046, India

Abstract: p-median problem is a well-known facility location problem which aims at locating p number of facilities over n demand points in such a way that the sum of distances from all the demand points to their respective closest facilities is minimised. In this paper, we have proposed an artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm-based approach for solving this NP-hard problem. The ABC algorithm is a recently proposed metaheuristic technique that has been used successfully for solving numerous NP-hard combinatorial optimisation problems. We have tested the proposed algorithm on the OR-Library and Galvao p-median benchmark test instances, and the results are compared with those obtained with some other approaches available in the literature. The computational results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other methods.

Keywords: artificial bee colony; ABC algorithm; facility location; p-median problem; swarm intelligence; metaheuristics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMHEUR.2016.080264

International Journal of Metaheuristics, 2016 Vol.5 No.2, pp.136 - 155

Received: 08 Dec 2015
Accepted: 07 Jul 2016
Published online: 09 Nov 2016 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article