Genetic subgradient method for solving location–allocation problems

Facility location–allocation (FLA) problem is a very important subject in today's business. It is an important part of a company's global logistic system. Various FLA problems have been considered in operations research (OR) under somehow stringent conditions. Restrictive conditions are placed to reduce the size of the search space, however, they also make the model inappropriate for the real-business world. In this paper, we consider a class of FLA problems that can assume more realistic conditions in real-life applications. A hybrid method of genetic algorithm and subgradient technique is used to solve the problem efficiently.