Deterministic and Randomized Heuristic Algorithms for Uncapacitated Facility Location Problem

A well-known combinatorial optimization problem, known as the Uncapacitated Facility Location Problem (UFLP) is considered in this paper. Given a set of customers and a set of potential facilities, the objective of UFLP is to open a subset of the potential facilities such that sum of the opening cost for opened facilities and the service cost of customers is minimized. In this paper, deterministic and randomized heuristic algorithms are presented to solve UFLP. The effectivenesses of the proposed algorithms are tested on UFLP instances taken from the OR-Library. Although the proposed deterministic algorithm gives optimal results for most of the instances, the randomized algorithm achieves optimal results for all the instances of UFLP considered in this paper including those for which the deterministic algorithm fails to achieve the optimal solutions.