An artificial bee colony algorithm based approach to the constrained p-center problem

P-center problem has been studied widely in operations research and computational geometry. It is a facility location problem. Here the goal is to find the best positions of p centers in a plane consisting of n demand points such that the maximum distance of any point from its nearest center is minimized. Constrained p-center problem is an extension of p-center problem where there are certain restrictions on placement of centers. This problem is more suitable to model real world applications than its unconstrained counterpart because of the practical restrictions on the placement of facilities, for example ATMs or gas stations can not be placed in the middle of a lake or a pond. This paper describes an artificial bee colony (ABC) approach for constrained p-center problem. Computational results show the effectiveness of our approach.