Generalization of the restricted planar location problems: Unified metaheuristic algorithms

In the restricted planar location problems, facilities cannot be located inside certain areas on the plane. We define congested regions as polygonal areas on the plane inside which locating a facility is infeasible but through which traveling is possible at an additional fixed cost. The location problem with congested regions on the Euclidean plane is shown to be a generalization of the two most studied problems in the literature, i.e. the restricted planar facility location problems with forbidden regions and with barriers. We propose three metaheuristic algorithms enhanced with a local search procedure to solve the restricted planar location problem. A user interface module is also developed to implement the algorithms on the test instances and analyze computational experiments. The test problem instances include those from the restricted planar facility location literature as well as modified large TSP and VRP instances from the routing literature. The presented computational results show the performance of the proposed algorithms and their effectiveness on solving problems with large size.