Region-rejection based heuristics for the capacitated multi-source Weber problem

A new type of constructive and adaptive heuristics is put forward to generate initial solutions for the capacitated multi-source Weber problem. This technique is based on guiding the search by constructing restricted regions that forbid new locations to be sited too close to the previously found locations. In this work, a restricted region is represented by a circle whose radius is initially set to a fixed value, based on the sparsity of the customers and the number of facilities, and then a scheme that dynamically adjusts the radius at each facility is proposed. A discretisation technique that divides a continuous space into a discrete number of cells while embedding the use of restricted regions within the search is also presented. The experiments show that the proposed region-rejection methods, though simple and easy to understand, provide encouraging results with regard to both solution quality and computational effort. Some future research avenues are also briefly highlighted.