A capacitated maximal covering location problem with different transportation modes, facilities, and set up costs

In this paper, a mathematical formulation is developed for a maximal-covering location problem (MCLP) with some real¬-world constraints such as space limitation at each potential site. In this model, different vehicle sizes and several possible capacity levels for the facility are considered. As an MCLP is NP-Hard itself, the use of a meta-heuristic algorithm to solve instances that exact algorithms cannot solve within a proper time limit is justified. In this paper, a genetic algorithm (GA) is utilized to solve the problem. Comparing the results obtained using GA with instances that an exact method can solve, shows good performances of GA.