Metaheuristic applications on discrete facility location problems: a survey

Abstract

This paper provides a detailed review of metaheuristic applications on discrete facility location problems. The objective of this paper is to provide a concise summary of solution approaches based on four commonly used metaheuristics: genetic algorithm, tabu search, particle swarm optimization and scatter search for different variants of the discrete facility location problem. Such a concise summary is expected to be useful for researchers interested in any of the major variants of discrete facility location problem as for each metaheuristic the paper provides a comprehensive review of different variants on which this metaheuristic has been applied, and the details of its implementation. Therefore, a research can exploit a method developed for another variant to solve the problem variant at hand. Based on our review of these papers, we also report some interesting observations, identify research gaps and highlight directions for future research.