Two Approaches to Simulated Annealing for Uncapacitated Facility Location Problems

The aim of this paper is to examine two new simulated annealing approaches for Uncapacitated Facility Location (UFL) problems with some useful comparisons with the latest genetic algorithm approach (Jaramillo et al, 2002) to the problem. As it is mentioned in various publications, the simulated annealing approach may be very successful in terms of quality of the solution but not so impressive with respect to the CPU times. The approaches presented in this paper are seeking for utilising that power of the method in getting quality of solutions within shorter time. For this purpose, simulated annealing algorithms incorporated in evolutionary and parallelisation approaches in order to cut down the time needed. Key words; facility planning and design, simulated annealing, multi-agent systems 1 Corresponding author Address: South Bank University, School of Computing, Information Systems and Maths, 103 Borough Road, London, SE1 0AA, UK Tel: +44 (20) 7815 7414 Fax: +44 (20) 7815 7499 e-mail: [email protected]