Two heuristic techniques for service location: An evaluation and comparison

This paper presents a comparison/evaluation of heuristic methods that have been proposed by Khumawala and Ardalan for selecting a specified number of service facility sites. An extensive experimental design is developed and simulated. The study uses three performance criteria: CPU times, average % cost derivation from optimal solution, and the percentage of times each method gives the optimal solution. The results indicate that the Khumawala method performs better when the number of sites to be selected is greater than approx. 30% of the number of communities to be served, and the Ardalan method tends to be more efficient when only a few sites are to be selected.