A tabu search heuristic for the uncapacitated facility location problem

Abstract

A tabu search heuristic procedure is developed to solve the uncapacitated facility location problem. The heuristic procedure uses tabu search to guide the solution process when evolving from one solution to another in order to search for an optimal solution. A move is defined to be the closing or opening of a facility. The net change in the total cost resulting from a move is used to measure the attractiveness of a move. Searching only a small subset of the feasible solutions that contains the optimal solution, the procedure is computationally very efficient. A computational experiment is conducted to test the performance of the procedure and computational results are reported. The procedure can easily find optimal solutions for test problems with known optimal solutions from the literature. Solutions obtained with this tabu search procedure completely dominate those obtained with the Lagrangian method for randomly generated test problems.© 2005 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.