A new reformulation approach for the generalized partial covering problem

In this paper, we consider a situation in which a group of facilities must be constructed in order to serve a given set of customers, where the facilities might not be able to guarantee an absolute coverage to the different customers. We examine the problem of maximizing the total service reliability of the system subject to a budgetary constraint. We propose a new reformulation of this problem that facilitates the generation of tight lower and upper bounds. These bounding mechanisms are embedded within the framework of a branch-and-bound procedure. Computational results on problem instances ranging in size up to 100 facilities and 200 customers reveal the efficacy of the proposed exact and heuristic approaches. (C) 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.