Abstract
Location problems have been studied extensively in the optimization literature, the p-median being probably one of the most tackled models. The obnoxious p-median is an interesting variant that appears in the context of hazardous location. The aim of this paper is to formally introduce a bi-objective optimization model for this problem, in which a solution consists of a set of p locations, and two conflicting objectives arise. On the one hand, the sum of the minimum distance between each client and their nearest open facility and, on the other hand, the dispersion among facilities. Both objective values should be kept as large as possible for a convenient location of dangerous facilities. We propose a Multi-Objective Memetic Algorithm (MOMA) to obtain high-quality approximations to the efficient front of the bi-objective obnoxious p-median problem, denoted as Bi-OpM. In particular, we introduce efficient crossover and mutation mechanisms. Additionally, we present several multi-objective local search methods. All the strategies are finally incorporated in a memetic algorithm which limits the search to the feasible region, thus performing an efficient exploration of the solutions space. Our experimentation compares several state-of-the-art procedures with the introduced MOMA emerging as the best performing method in all considered multi-objective metrics.
J. Manuel Colmenar
Associate Professor
My research interests are focused on metaheuristics applied to optimization problems. I have worked on different combinatorial optimization problems applying trajectorial algorithms such us GRASP or VNS. Besides, I am very interested in applications of Grammatical Evolution, specifically in model and prediction domain, as alternative to machine learning approaches.
Abraham Duarte
Full Professor
Abraham Duarte is Full Professor in the Computer Science Department at the Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid, Spain). He has done extensive research in the interface between computer science, artificial intelligence, and operations research to develop solution methods based on Computational Intelligence (metaheuristics) for practical problems in operations-management areas such as logistics and supply chains, telecommunications, decision-making under uncertainty and optimization of simulated systems.