New Algorithm Outperforms Existing Methods for Facility Location Problem

A research paper introduces an enhanced Large Neighborhood Search (LNS) approach for the capacitated facility location problem with incompatible customers. This variant addresses real-world scenarios where certain customer pairs cannot be served by the same facility, such as in hazardous material handling or competitive business environments. The proposed method combines three different destroy operators in a hybrid manner and uses an exact solver for the repair phase. Experimental results demonstrate that the new LNS method outperforms existing state-of-the-art metaheuristics, achieving new best solutions across all benchmark instances. The study contributes to the field of artificial intelligence and operations research, offering improved optimization for facility location challenges.