Solving the planar p-median problem by variable neighborhood and concentric searches.

Two new approaches for the solution of the $$p$$ -median problem in the plane are proposed. One is a Variable Neighborhood Search and the other one is a concentric search. Both approaches are enhanced by a front-end procedure for finding good starting solutions and a decomposition heuristic acting as a post optimization procedure. Computational results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]