An improved scatter search algorithm for the corridor allocation problem considering corridor width

Abstract

In the existing literature on the corridor allocation problem (CAP), the corridor width is not taken into consideration. But in the actual production, the corridor width plays a very important role in logistics transportation inside factories. To study the effect of the corridor width in a CAP problem, the corridor width is considered by a mixed-integer programming model proposed in this paper. Subsequently, an improved scatter search (ISS) algorithm is proposed to handle the CAP. Several improvement mechanisms have been applied to the ISS according to the special characteristics of the problem, such as the adoption of a simulated annealing operation, a dynamic reference set update method, and an improved subset generation method. The proposed ISS is evaluated on test instances of various sizes ranging from 9 to 49 facilities. Computational results demonstrate the validity of the ISS. Specifically, for small-sized instances, the acquired best solutions by the ISS are identical to the optimal solutions obtained by the exact solution given by GUROBI, while for moderate and large-sized instances, the objective values by the ISS are better than those solved by the method in GUROBI. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm shows better performance in solution quality and stability by comparing to the simulated annealing algorithm and the scatter search algorithm.