A new heuristic algorithm for the planar minimum covering circle problem

Abstract

The minimum covering circle problem is widely utilized in the studies of single or multiple facility location problems. It may be employed to locate the essential locations of factories, schools, fire departments, hospital establishments, and other facilities, which could be considered as a point in a plane theoretically. In this paper, a new geometrical algorithm is presented which determines the minimum covering circle of all points on a plane in four steps. The model validity was considered by studying the coordinates of points with random numbers and different distributions. In order to show the accuracy of the proposed algorithm, numerical experiments were carried out and compared with other studies in the field. The results show that the proposed algorithm extremely outperforms other examined algorithms.