Solving Uncapacitated Facility Location Problem Using Monkey Algorithm

Abstract

The Uncapacitated Facility Location Problem (UFLP) is considered in this paper. Given a set of customers and a set of potential facility locations, the objective of UFLP is to open a subset of facilities to satisfy the demands of all the customers such that the sum of the opening cost for the opened facilities and the service cost is minimized. UFLP is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem which is also NP-hard. So, a metaheuristic algorithm for solving this problem is natural choice. In this paper, a relatively new swarm intelligence-based algorithm known as the Monkey Algorithm (MA) is applied to solve UFLP. To validate the efficiency of the proposed binary MA-based algorithm, experiments are carried out with various data instances of UFLP taken from the OR-Library and the results are compared with those of the Firefly Algorithm (FA) and the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm.