An exact algorithm for the capacitated facility location problems with single sourcing

Facility location problems are often encountered in many areas such as distribution, transportation and telecommunication. We describe a new solution approach for the capacitated facility location problem in which each customer is served by a single facility. An important class of heuristic solution methods for these problems are Lagrangian heuristics which have been shown to produce high quality solutions and at the same time be quite robust. A primal heuristic, based on a repeated matching algorithm which essentially solves a series of matching problems until certain convergence criteria are satisfied, is incorporated into the Lagrangian heuristic. Finally, a branch-and-bound method, based on the Lagrangian heuristic is developed, and compared computationally to the commercial code CPLEX. The computational results indicate that the proposed method is very efficient. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.