Article ID: | iaor20122502 |
Volume: | 51 |
Issue: | 3 |
Start Page Number: | 1275 |
End Page Number: | 1295 |
Publication Date: | Apr 2012 |
Journal: | Computational Optimization and Applications |
Authors: | Yuan Xiaoming, Jiang Jianlin |
Keywords: | combinatorial optimization, gradient methods, facilities |
We are interested in locations of multiple facilities in the plane with the aim of minimizing the sum of weighted distance between these facilities and regional customers, where the distance between a facility and a regional customer is evaluated by the farthest distance from this facility to the demand region. By applying the well‐known location‐allocation heuristic, the main task for solving such a problem turns out to solve a number of constrained Weber problems (CWPs). This paper focuses on the computational contribution in this topic by developing a variant of the classical Barzilai‐Borwein (BB) gradient method to solve the reduced CWPs. Consequently, a hybrid Cooper type method is developed to solve the problem under consideration. Preliminary numerical results are reported to verify the evident effectiveness of the new method.