A Comparative Study of Facility Location Solution Techniques

This paper describes and presents the results of an experiment dealing with facility location problems which differ with respect to their size -- the number of facilities and markets considered -- and the complexity of their cost functions. The research reported here describes the results obtained when examining two vastly different solution techniques and their applicability to different types of problems. It is especially useful because it deals with two questions which have received little attention to date:

1)

Do differences in the complexity of the cost functions affect the ability of specific solution techniques to solve the problem?; and

2)

Does the size of the problem, that is, the number of location alternatives affect the ability of a specific technique to solve the problem?

The location problems considered in this paper are simplified ones. However, it is possible to use similar research techniques to examine the effect of using various solution methods with a set of more complex problems.