Globally optimal facility locations for continuous-space facility location problems

Abstract

The continuous-space single-and multi-facility location problem has attracted much attention in previous studies. This study focuses on determining the globally optimal facility locations for two-and higher-dimensional continuous-space facility location problems when the Manhattan distance is considered. Before we propose the exact method, we start with the continuous-space single-facility location problem and obtain the global minimizer for the problem using a statistical approach. Then, an exact method is developed to determine the globally optimal solution for the two-and higher-dimensional continuous-space facility location problem, which is different from the previous clustering algorithms. Based on the newly investigated properties of the minimizer, we extend it to multi-facility problems and transfer the continuous-space facility location problem to the discrete-space location problem. To illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method, several instances from a benchmark are provided to compare the performances of different methods, which illustrates the superiority of the proposed exact method in the decision-making of the continuous-space facility location problems.