Multi-Exchange Neighborhood Search Heuristics for the Multi-Source Capacitated Facility Location Problem

We present two local-search based metaheuristics for the multi-source capacitated facility location problem. In such a problem, each customer's demand can be supplied by one or more facilities. The problem is NP-hard and the number of locations in the optimal solution is unknown. To keep the search process effective, the proposed methods adopt the following features: (1) a multi-exchange neighborhood structure, (2) a tabu list that keeps track of recently visited solutions, and (3) a multi-start to enhance the diversified search paths. The transportation simplex method is applied in an efficient manner to obtain the optimal solutions to neighbors of the current solution under the algorithm framework. Two in-and-out selection rules are also proposed in the algorithms with the purpose of finding promising solutions in a short computational time. Our computational results for some of the benchmark instances, as well as some instances generated using a method in the literature, have demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach.