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An effective heuristic for large-scale capacitated facility location problems

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Abstract

The Capacitated Facility Location Problem (CFLP) consists of locating a set of facilities with capacity constraints to satisfy the demands of a set of clients at the minimum cost. In this paper we propose a simple and effective heuristic for large-scale instances of CFLP. The heuristic is based on a Lagrangean relaxation which is used to select a subset of “promising” variables forming the core problem and on a Branch-and-Cut algorithm that solves the core problem. Computational results on very large scale instances (up to 4 million variables) are reported.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. RCOST—Research Center on Software Technology, Università del Sannio, Viale Traiano, 82100, Benevento, Italy

    Pasquale Avella & Maurizio Boccia

  2. Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”, Via Claudio 21, 80125, Napoli, Italy

    Antonio Sforza

  3. Institute of System Dynamics and Control Theory, Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, Lermontov Srt., 134, 664033, Irkutsk, Russia

    Igor Vasil’ev

Authors
  1. Pasquale Avella
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  2. Maurizio Boccia
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  3. Antonio Sforza
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  4. Igor Vasil’ev
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Correspondence to Antonio Sforza.

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Avella, P., Boccia, M., Sforza, A. et al. An effective heuristic for large-scale capacitated facility location problems. J Heuristics 15, 597–615 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-008-9078-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-008-9078-y

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