A Genetic Algorithm Based Approach for the Uncapacitated Continuous Location–Allocation Problem

A GA-based approach is introduced to address the continuous location–allocation problem. Selection and removal procedures based on groups of chromosomes instead of individual chromosomes are put forward and specific crossover and mutation operators that rely on the impact of the genes are proposed. A new operator that injects once in a while new chromosomes into the population is also introduced. This provides diversity within the search and attempts to avoid early convergence. This approach is tested on existing data sets using several runs to evaluate the robustness of the proposed GA approach.