A hybrid PSO model for solving continuous p-median problem

Abstract

p-Median problem is one of the most applicable problem in the areas of supply chain management and operation research. There are various versions of these problems. Continuous p-median is one of them where the facility points and the demand points lie in an ’n’ dimensional hyperspace. It has been proved that this problem is NP-complete and most of the algorithms that have been defined are mere approximations. In this paper, we present a meta-heuristic based approach that calculates the median points given a set of demand points with arbitrary demands. The algorithm is a combination of genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization and a number of novel techniques that aims to further improve the result. The algorithm is tested on known data sets as and we show’s its performance in comparison to other known algorithms applied on the same problem.