Integrated use of soft computing and clustering for capacitated clustering single-facility location problem with one-time delivery

Abstract

How to setup the distribution centers (DC) is not only a general issue but also a quite profound knowledge in real world. This problem called capacitated clustering location problem (CCP), then the previous literature, the target of the CCP is to minimize the sum of distances from each DC to all customers in their cluster. However, some types of the company shipping are different from the above. The DC must ship goods to all customers in its cluster in a cycle time. This delivery way called “one-time delivery” and it can be modeled as Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). In order to solve this practical problem, a hybrid algorithm, Simplified Swarm Optimization combining with K-harmonic means (SSOKHM) is proposed in this paper for the CCP and using greedy algorithm for the TSP to obtain the minimize shipping costs. Proposed method is applied to several facility location problems from OR library. Numerical results show that the SSOKHM performance is better than using other hybrid clustering algorithms in terms of shipping costs. Finally, we embed the exchange local search for each algorithm. The results are presented that this inspection mechanism can enhance the performance and demonstrate the usefulness in CCP.