Fuzzy c-means and simulated annealing for planar location-routing problem

Abstract

Location-routing problem (LRP) contains two Np-hard problems as, facility location (FL) and vehicle routing problem (VRP), in the same content. Since both problems directly affect the cost of distributions of the products and supply chain, the decision of location and routing is important for the success of companies. Therefore, many attempts are made to solve LRP problem in the literature. Researchers proposed exact and heuristic methods for LRP. However, exact methods cannot provide solutions for considerably large instances. In this paper, a new heuristic method is proposed for continuous or planar LRP. The proposed method contains fuzzy c-means for continuous location problem and simulated annealing algorithm for vehicle routing problem, respectively. The proposed method is applied to both capacitated and uncapacitated LRP instances that are widely used in the literature. Results of the proposed method are compared with successful researches that are made on this problem in terms of the total cost.