Solving terminal assignment problems with groups encoding: The wedding banquet problem

This paper presents an extension of the terminal assignment problem (TA) in the case that groups of terminals must be assigned together. We analyze this situation by means of an equivalent problem: the wedding banquet problem (WBP). We provide a description of the problem and its mathematical definition. We also describe an application of the WBP to mobile communications network design. Two hybrid metaheuristics algorithms for the WBP are presented in the paper. We test their performance in several computational experiments, including synthetic instances of the WBP, and a mobile network design application.