A greedy randomized adaptive search procedure for solving the uncapacitated plant cycle problem

Abstract

The Uncapacitated Plant Cycle Problem seeks to select a subset of potential locations in which to open plants dedicated to provide service to customers scattered abroad upon the field. The locations are known and each plant can serve an unlimited number of customers through a vehicle route. The objective of this problem is to (i) determine the number of plants to open, (ii) select the subset of locations in which to open the plants, (iii) assign a non-empty subset of customers to each plant, and (iv) determine a vehicle route dedicated to serve the subset of customers assigned to each plant. With the goal of solving this problem from an approximate point of view, a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure is proposed in this paper. The computational experiments disclose the suitable performance of this algorithmic approach, which allows to reach high-quality solutions in reasonable computational times.