A simple multi-wave algorithm for the uncapacitated facility location problem

Abstract

The multi-wave algorithm (Glover, 2016) integrates tabu search and strategic oscillation utilizing repeated waves (nested iterations) of constructive search or neighborhood search. We propose a simple multi-wave algorithm for solving the Uncapacitated Facility Location Problem (UFLP) to minimize the combined costs of selecting facilities to be opened and of assigning each customer to an opened facility in order to meet the customers’ demands. The objective is to minimize the overall cost including the costs of opening facilities and the costs of allocations. Our experimental tests on a standard set of benchmarks for this widely-studied class of problems show that our algorithm outperforms all previous methods.