A greedy randomized adaptive search procedure for a single-product uncapacitated facility location problem

Abstract

Abstract
This paper considers the three-echelon uncapacitated facility location problem (TUFLP), which consists on both defining the flow of products from manufacturing plants to clients via a set of warehouses and the location of such warehouses. The objective function is to minimize the total cost of warehouse
location and production and distribution. Since the problem is NP-hard, this paper proposes a Greedy Randomized Search Procedure (GRASP) to solve the single-item case. Computational experiments are conducted using known instances from the literature. Results show that the proposed algorithm performs well obtaining very good solutions (and even optimal values) in less computational time than an exact method based on mixed-integer linear programming.