Solving single facility goal Weber location problem using stochastic optimization methods

Location theory is one of the most important topics in optimization and operations research. In location problems, the goal is to find the location of one or more facilities in a way such that some criteria such as transportation costs, customer traveling distance, total service time, and cost of servicing are optimized. In this paper, we investigate the goal Weber location problem in which the location of a number of demand points on a plane is given, and the ideal is locating the facility in the distance R_i, from the i-th demand point. However, in most instances, the solution of this problem does not exist. Therefore, the minimizing sum of errors is considered. The goal Weber location problem with the l_p norm is solved using the stochastic version of the LBFGS method, which is a second-order limited memory method for minimizing large-scale problems. According to the obtained numerical results, this algorithm achieves a lower optimal value in less time with comparing to other common and popular stochastic optimization algorithms.