Article ID: | iaor20052052 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 157 |
Issue: | 3 |
Start Page Number: | 576 |
End Page Number: | 591 |
Publication Date: | Sep 2004 |
Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Michel Laurent, Hentenryck Pascal Van |
Keywords: | heuristics |
The uncapacitated warehouse location problem (UWLP) is a heavily studied combinatorial optimization problem, which has been tackled by various approaches, such as linear-programming, branch and bound, genetic algorithms, and local search. This paper presents a simple, yet robust and efficient, tabu-search algorithm for the UWLP. The algorithm was evaluated on the standard OR Library benchmarks and on the M* instances which are very challenging for mathematical programming approaches. The benchmarks include instances of size 2000 × 2000. Despite its conceptual and programming simplicity, the algorithm finds optimal solutions to all benchmarks very quickly and with very high frequencies. It also compares favorably with state-of-the-art genetic algorithms and should be a very valuable addition to the repertoire of tools for uncapacitated warehouse location due to its simplicity and effectiveness.