Solving Uncapacitated Facility Location Problem Using Heuristic Algorithms

A well-known combinatorial optimization problem, known as the uncapacitated facility location problem (UFLP) is considered in this article. A deterministic heuristic algorithm and a randomized heuristic algorithm are presented to solve UFLP. Though the proposed deterministic heuristic algorithm is very simple, it produces good solution for each instance of UFLP considered in this article. The main purpose of this article is to process all the data sets of UFLP available in the literature using a single algorithm. The proposed two algorithms are applied on these test instances of UFLP to determine their effectiveness. Here, the solution obtained from the proposed randomized algorithm is at least as good as the solution produced by the proposed deterministic algorithm. Hence, the proposed deterministic algorithm gives upper bound on the solution produced by the randomized algorithm. Although the proposed deterministic algorithm gives optimal results for most of the instances of UFLP, the randomized algorithm achieves optimal results for all the instances of UFLP considered in this article including those for which the deterministic algorithm fails to achieve the optimal solutions.