Facility Location Problem Using Genetic Algorithm: A Review

A facility location problem is like a firm having some possible locations to locate facilities in. At each location the firm has a particular value of the objective function determined on the basis of various factors involving number of employees, setup cost etc.. Given a budget to build the facilities and fixed construction cost depending upon the size of customers to be served by the facility, the objective is to minimize the total traveling distance by the employees. In the facility location problem, each node i is associated with a facility cost fi, which reflects the cost of opening a facility at this node. The problem is to open a subset of facilities so as to minimize the sum of facility costs and the service cost. The service cost is defined to be the sum of distances from each node to its closest open facility. In this paper we use Genetic Algorithm (GA) to solve Facility Location Problem. GA is a set of meta heuristics that derives its inspiration from natural evolutionary process of the survival of the fittest and have been successfully applied to many large scale combinatorial optimization problems.