An improved genetic algorithm with local refinement for solving hierarchical single-allocation hub median facility location problem.

Hierarchical Single-Allocation Hub Median Facility Location Problem (SA-H-MP) is a well-known optimization problem having single objective function. The objective of SA-H-MP is to find a network of demand nodes, hubs and central hubs so that the service cost is minimized. In this article, we have proposed two meta-heuristic algorithms, Genetic Algorithm (GA) and its refined version and compare their performances with CPLEX (exact method), Simulated Annealing (SA) and Iterated Local Search (ILS). These approaches are validated on the well-known benchmark CAB data set. Proposed refined version of the GA is found to improve the result over other meta heuristics in more than 88% cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]