The particle swarm optimization algorithm for the p-median facility location problem

This research examines methods for solving the p-median problem, which is an important type of the facility location problems and belongs to the class of NP hard problems. A swarm based meta-heuristic, the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is applied for the solution of the p-median problem. The study concludes with presentation of results obtained from the application of the PSO algorithm to two of the widely used ORLIB and Galvao test problems. In addition, the results are compared to the solutions obtained from applications of other well-known heuristic and meta-heuristic methods to the same problems.