Optimal Placement of a Finite-size Facility: A Computational Study of Sequential and Parallel Implementations

We present a computational study related to the optimal placement of a single, finite-size, rectangular facility in presence of other rectangular facilities. All the facilities interact with each other through the input/output points located on their boundary. The objective is to locate the new facility optimally so as to minimize the total weighted rectilinear distance between the interacting facilities. We explore two different solution procedures: (1) a parallel explicit enumeration procedure using message passing interface (MPI); and (2) the sequential dominance procedure. We test both procedures on randomly generated layouts and compare the benefits of parallelization versus the dominance rules.