Improvements and Comparison of Heuristics for Solving the Uncapacitated Multisource Weber Problem

Jack Brimberg; Pierre Hansen; Nenad Mladenović; Eric D. Taillard

doi:10.1287/opre.48.3.444.12431

Improvements and Comparison of Heuristics for Solving the Uncapacitated Multisource Weber Problem

Jack Brimberg¹; Pierre Hansen²; Nenad Mladenović²; Eric D. Taillard³

¹ School of Business Administration, University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown, Canada C1A 4P3 · ² GERAD and Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, 3000, chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine, Montreal, Canada H3T 2A7 · ³ IDSIA, Corso Elvezia 36, CH-6900 Lugano, Switzerland

Operations Research 2000

The multisource Weber problem is to locate simultaneously m facilities in the Euclidean plane to minimize the total transportation cost for satisfying the demand of n fixed users, each supplied from its closest facility. Many heuristics have been proposed for this problem, as well as a few exact algorithms. Heuristics are needed to solve quickly large problems and to provide good initial solutions for exact algorithms. We compare various heuristics, i.e., alternative location-allocation (Cooper 1964), projection (Bongartz et al. 1994), Tabu search (Brimberg and Mladenović 1996a), p-Median plus Weber (Hansen et al. 1996), Genetic search and several versions of Variable Neighbourhood search. Based on empirical tests that are reported, it is found that most traditional and some recent heuristics give poor results when the number of facilities to locate is large and that Variable Neighbourhood search gives consistently best results, on average, in moderate computing time.

DOI: 10.1287/opre.48.3.444.12431
Volume: 48 (3)
Pages: 444-460
Language: en
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