High performance computing applied to competitive facility location and design problems: single and multi-objective optimization algorithms

High performance computing applied to competitive facility location and design problems: single and multi-objective optimization algorithms A mis padres, a mi hermano y a Manu Agradecimientos En primer lugar me gustaría agradecer a mis tres supervisores, Dra. D Prefacio La localización de servicios pretende encontrar el emplazamiento de uno o más centros Esta tesis, " High performance computing applied to competitive facility location and design problems: single and multi-objective optimization algorithms " Preface Facility location applications are concerned with the location of one or more facilities in a way that optimizes one or several objectives at the same time, such as minimizing transportation costs, providing equitable service to customers, capturing the largest market share, etc. The research on facility location problems spans many research fields such as operations research/management science, industrial engineering, geography , economics, computer science, mathematics, marketing, urban planning, and the corresponding related fields. There exist many facility location problems in real life, for example location of hospitals , schools or rubbish dumps, to name a few. Nevertheless, to be able to obtain certain solutions to location problems, it is necessary to describe them as close to reality as possible, which may result in hard-to-solve optimization models. Many global optimization algorithms, either exact or heuristic, have flourished to cope with location problems. However, exact algorithms are unable to solve some problems, because they are too slow or the computer runs out of memory. Thus, heuristic procedures have to be developed to solve those other difficult problems. Nevertheless, sometimes, computational requirements are so high that the use of heuristic algorithms running in standard computers is not enough. In such situations, high performance computing is needed. This thesis, " High performance computing applied to competitive facility location and design problems: single and multi-objective optimization algorithms " , provides, on the one hand, heuristic algorithms able to solve single and multi-objective competitive continuous location problems and, on the other hand, parallel techniques which reduce the execution time, allow to solve larger problems and, in some cases, improve the quality of the solutions. This thesis is organized in four chapters. The first one is an introduction to the three main research areas involved in this thesis, i.e., location science, search algorithms and high performance computing. Chapter 1 begins with a brief description of the main elements of a location problem. Then, the definition of global optimization and non-linear multi-objective optimization problems is …