Implementing Genetic Algorithm to solve Facility Location Problem

Facility location problem is the problem of finding optimal location for facilities in a plane consisting of demand points so that each demand point has at least one facility at a distance no more than some permissible distance. Facility location problem has its wide spread application in all areas. The problem of Facility location arises when it is to be decided where to locate a printer, server, ware house or where to open a new store of a business chain. Facility location problem have several application in telecommunication, transportation, distribution etc. This widespread application of Facility Location Problem has invited many researchers to try their hand to solve the problem. The problem of Facility Location is a well known NP-hard problem and various heuristics have been proposed over the time to solve the problem. There exist multiple variants of the facility location problem like p-center problem or p-median problem. Here in this paper, we have attempted to solve the well known p- median problem. We use genetic algorithm to solve the capacitated version of p-median problem.