Constructive Heuristics for uncapacitated multisource Weber problem with zone-dependent fixed cost

Abstract

Location analysis is a discipline of Operational Research that requires locating a set of new facilities and simultaneously allocating a set of customers to these facilities in order to optimize some constraints such as the demand of the customers and minimizing the total cost. In fact, the total cost itself can be a combination of transportation cost and fixed cost. Fixed cost is a cost associated with opening a given facility which may vary from one area to another. Therefore, the aim of this study is to solve one of the continuous location-allocation problems that is uncapacitated multisource Weber problem with zone-dependent fixed cost using Constructive Heuristics. Constructive Heuristics can be defined as a method of constructing a solution step by step. Five variants of the Constructive Heuristics are presented and their solutions are compared. The methods are used to locating two facilities (m=2)with equal capacity using data set of 50 customers problem taken from the literature. The solution technique is programmed by using C++ programming.