An Efficient Approach to Discrete Multiple Different Facility Location Problem

The Multiple Facility Location Problem (MFLP) is to locate certain facilities so as to serve a given set of customers, whose locations and requirements are known. When the locations have to be selected from a given set of candidate locations, the problem becomes a Discrete Multiple Facility Location Problem (DMFLP). In this study, a special case of DMFLP is discussed where multiple facilities that are of different type are to be placed (location decision) and assign customers to these facilities (allocation or assignment). Both cases with and without interactions among new facilities are considered in this problem. In this paper, efficient lower and upper bounds are used to propose a branch-and-bound scheme as an exact method. Also, new heuristic method is provided for both cases and compared for large-job sizes. Computational results on randomly generated data in comparison with optimal solutions indicate that the heuristic method is accurate and efficient.