Nested heuristic methods for the location-routeing problem

The concept of ‘nested methods’ is adopted to solve the location-routeing problem. Unlike the sequential and iterative approaches, in this method the routeing element is treated as a sub-problem within the larger problem of location. Efficient techniques that take into account the above concept and which use a neighbourhood structure inspired from computational geometry are presented. A simple version of tabu search is also embedded into the methods to improve the solutions further. Computational testing is carried out on five sets of problems of 400 customers with five levels of depot fixed costs, and the results obtained are encouraging.