Two Phase Genetic Approach to Single Source Capacitated Facility Location Problem

With rise in urbanization, problem of optimally allocating facilities to satisfy the needs of customers has gained importance. Most of the solutions proposed in literature have modelled the Single Source Capacitated Facility Location Problem (SSCFLP) as an optimization problem minimizing the cost. We have proposed a two phase solution to the problem. First phase is a pre-processing step which reduces the search space. Second phase applies genetic algoithm to obtain a solution for the problem. The proposed algorithm is tested on benchmark datasets taken from Delmaire etal., and the search space was found to converge to a nearly optimal result in most of the cases. Also, proposed solution with preprocessing phase is found to achieve effective results in comparison to approach without pre-processing step, both with respect to the solution obtained and number of generations.