The discrete Unconscious search and its application to uncapacitated facility location problem

•A discrete Unconscious search algorithm is proposed for uncapacitated facility location problem.•Performance comparison with the most notable results known is carried out.•The proposed algorithm proved best in robustness of solutions to the test problem.•The proposed algorithm is less sensitive to initial parameters than other metaheuristic.

In this paper a discrete variant of Unconscious search (US) for solving uncapacitated facility location problem (UFLP) is proposed. Unconscious search mimics the process of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in which the psychoanalyst tries to access the unconscious of a mental patient to find the root cause his/her problem, which is encapsulated in unconsciousness. Unconscious search is a multi-start metaheuristic which has three main stages, namely construction, construction review and local search. In construction phase a new solution is generated. In construction review the generated solution in construction phase is used to produce more starting points for using in the local search phase. The results of applying US to UFLP shows that this metaheuristic can determine high quality solutions in short processing time comparing to other heuristics.