Revised Weighted Fuzzy C-Means and Fortified Weiszfeld Hybrid Method for Uncapacitated Multi-Facility Location Problems

Isik Guzelgoz,Sakir Esnaf,Tarik Kucukdeniz

doi:10.4018/ijoris.2019100104

Abstract

In this article, a hybrid method is proposed to solve the uncapacitated planar multi-facility location problems. The new hybrid method consists of a combination of the Revised Weighted Fuzzy C-Means (RWFCM) algorithm proposed by Esnaf and Küçükdeniz (2013) and the Fortified Weiszfeld algorithm developed by Drezner (2015). The cluster centers and the cluster assignments of the RWFCM are fed into the Fortified Weiszfeld Algorithm separately for each cluster and facility-customer allocations are determined. The proposed approach is benchmarked on sample datasets from the facility location literature. Results of the proposed hybrid method show that the newly proposed sequentially-run method achieves better results when compared against the benchmark methods. This paper is a pioneer study of the hybrid use of Revised Weighted Fuzzy C-Means and Fortified Weiszfeld algorithms.

Highlights

In this paper, a hybrid algorithm to solve uncapacitated planar multi-facility location problems is proposed
The new hybrid method consists of a combination of the Revised Weighted Fuzzy C-Means (RWFCM) algorithm proposed by Esnaf and Küçükdeniz (2013) and the Fortified Weiszfeld algorithm developed by Drezner (2015)
The cluster centers and the cluster assignments of the RWFCM are fed into the Fortified Weiszfeld Algorithm separately for each cluster and facility-customer allocations are determined

Summary

INTRODUCTION

A hybrid algorithm to solve uncapacitated planar multi-facility location problems is proposed. In many applications of MFLP, decomposing the problem into a single facility location is very common because these problems are NP-hard (Esnaf and Küçükdeniz, 2013). Another important factor in solving MFLP is the structure of the facility and demand points: Continuous (planar), network or discrete structures. Other factors are static or dynamic structures of the facility, ownership of the facility as public or private, deterministic or probabilistic characteristics of the demand, the addition of facilities to the existing system or facility closure, and fixed and variable costs In this paper, it is focused on determining locations of uncapacitated facilities in a d-dimensional plane.

LITERATURE REVIEW

EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Findings

CONCLUSION