GRASP with Evolutionary Path Relinking for the conditional p-Dispersion problem

Resumen

In this paper, we propose a new heuristic method that hybridizes GRASP with Path Relinking to solve the conditional p-Dispersion problem. Given n elements, from which q < n have been already selected, this problem seeks to select p < n additional unselected elements to maximize the minimum dissimilarity among them. The conditional p-dispersion problem models a facility location problem motivated by a real situation faced in many practical settings arising when some facilities have been already located. The algorithm includes a novel proposal based on an efficient interplay between search intensification and diversification provided by the Path Relinking component, and it also incorporates an intelligent way to measure the diversity among solutions. An extensive computational experimentation is carried out to compare the performance of our heuristic with the state of the art method. The comparison shows that our proposal is competitive with the existing method, since it is able to identify 17 best-known values. Additionally, our experimentation includes a real practical case solved for a Spanish company in its expansion process. This case illustrates both the applicability of the conditional p-dispersion model, and the suitability of our algorithm to efficiently solve practical instances.

Publicación
Applied Soft Computing
Jesús Sánchez-Oro
Jesús Sánchez-Oro
Profesor Titular de Universidad

Profesor Titular del Departamento de Informática, siendo uno de los investigadores principales del Grupo de Investigación de Algoritmos para la Optimización GRAFO.

Abraham Duarte
Abraham Duarte
Catedrático de Universidad

Mi carrera investigadora se ha centrado en el desarrollo de nuevos algoritmos y técnicas de Inteligencia Computacional (metaheurísticas) y su aplicación a diferentes problemas en Ciencia e Ingeniería desde que me incorporé a la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC) en el octubre del año 2000.