A hybrid algorithm for capacitated plant location problem

This paper presents a new hybrid algorithm for a classical capacitated plant location problem. Benders’ decomposition algorithm has been successfully applied in many areas. A major difficulty with this decomposition lies in the solution of master problem, which is a “hard” problem, costly to compute. Our proposed algorithm, instead of using a costly branch-and-bound method, incorporates a genetic algorithm to obtain “good” suboptimal solutions to the master problem at a tremendous saving in the computational effort. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested on randomly generated data and also well-known existing data. The computational results indicate that the proposed algorithm is effective and efficient for the capacitated plant location problem and competitive with the Benders’ decomposition algorithm.