Solving Large p‐Median Problems with a Radius Formulation

By means of a model based on a set covering formulation, it is shown how the p‐median problem can be solved with just a column generation approach that is embedded in a branch‐and‐bound framework based on dynamic reliability branching. This method is more than competitive in terms of computational times and size of the instances that have been optimally solved. In particular, problems of a size larger than the largest ones considered in the literature up to now are solved exactly in this paper.