A HEURISTIC PREPROCESSOR SUPPORTED ALGORITHM FOR THE CAPACITATED PLANT LOCATION PROBLEM

The capacitated plant location problem is an example of a binary problem that is a special case of the mixed integer programming problem. General solution methods, which can be used to solve any mixed integer programming problem, prove to be inefficient when applied to the capacitated plant location problem. Heuristic procedures, on the other hand, are effective means to obtain good, possibly optimal, solutions, but their optimality cannot be guaranteed. In this paper we developed an exact algorithm for solving the capacitated plant location problem based on the "generalized search origin concept," which uses a starting solution obtained by an efficient heuristic procedure. The algorithm is tested on problems found in the literature and computational results are presented.