A New Approach to Solving Applied Location/AIIocation Problems

Facility location and customer allocation problems are pervasive in industry and in the private sector. In this paper, the authors outline a new approach to solving these problems that avoids the need to resort to integer programming techniques. The approach exploits the mathematical structure of the problem as well as characteristics frequently found in applied location/allocation problems. Using this approach, large scale problems are readily solvable on personal computers. This paper illustrates the approach on a small example and provides computational results based on a real-world application of the technique. Extensions to include additional problem features are also discussed.