Multi-objective uncapacitated facility location problem with customers’ preferences: Pareto-based and weighted sum GA-based approaches

The uncapacitated facility location problem (UFLP) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem having single-objective function. The objective of UFLP is to find a subset of facilities from a given set of potential facility locations such that the sum of the opening costs of the opened facilities and the service cost to serve all the customers is minimized. In traditional UFLP, customers are served by their nearest facilities. In this article, we have proposed a multi-objective UFLP where each customer has a preference for each facility. Hence, the objective of the multi-objective UFLP with customers’ preferences (MOUFLPCP) is to open a subset of facilities to serve all the customers such that the sum of the opening cost and service cost is minimized and the sum of the preferences is maximized. In this article, the elitist non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II), a popular Pareto-based GA, is employed to solve this problem. Moreover, a weighted sum genetic algorithm (WSGA)-based approach is proposed to solve MOUFLPCP where conflicting two objectives of the problem are aggregated to a single quality measure. For experimental purposes, new test instances of MOUFLPCP are created from the existing UFLP benchmark instances and the experimental results obtained using NSGA-II and WSGA-based approaches are demonstrated and compared for these newly created test instances.