Clustering Search Heuristic for the Capacitated p -Median Problem

In this paper we present a hybrid heuristic for the capacitated p-median problem (CPMP). This problem considers a set of n points, each of them with a known demand, the objective consists of finding p medians and assign each point to exactly one median such that the total distance of assigned points to their corresponding medians is minimized, and the a capacity limit on the medians may not be exceeded. The purpose of this paper is to present a new hybrid heuristic to solve the CPMP, called Clustering Search (CS), which consists in detecting promising search areas based on clustering. Computational results show that the CS found the best known solutions in all most instances.