Heuristic concentration: two stage solution construction

The Heuristic Concentration methodology for enhancing the effectiveness of heuristic solutions to combinatorial optimization problems is introduced. The two-stage strategy, which is illustrated using the p-median problem, constructs a concentrated solution set (CS) during the first stage by exploiting information from multiple iterations of an interchange heuristic. It then derives the optimal solution from the restricted CS during the second stage using an exact procedure.