VisOpt: a visual interactive optimization tool for P-median problems

1 School of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas. email: [email protected] 2 Department of Management, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater Ok, 74078 email: [email protected] 3 Department of Accounting and MIS, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210 email: [email protected] Abstract. In this paper we describe a visual interactive decision support tool ‘VisOpt’ which is designed to solve P-median problems with capacity constraints. Various design features incorporated in VisOpt are also presented and analyzed. We also present a demonstration of the use of VisOpt by a number of human subjects for various problem instances. The quality of solutions obtained by subjects using VisOpt is compared with that obtained from a standard stand alone heuristic. The visual interactive tool provides encouraging results in this specific problem context.