An Improvised Hybrid Heuristic Algorithm for Uncapacitated Facility Location Problems

Abstract

Uncapacitated facility location (UFL) problems have received wide attention of many researchers over the past decade, particularly owing to their extensive applicability. While many exact and heuristic algorithms have been developed to solve the UFL problems, most of them cannot guarantee hit ratio (HR) and average relative percent error (ARPE). This paper presents the development of a hybrid heuristic combining stepwise allocation of facilities heuristic procedure with greedy search procedure and tested with benchmark problems of varying sizes chosen from the literature. The results indicate the superior performance as compared to three other hybrid algorithms.